VAG diesel engines....please explain to me?

Is it true you're doing the 140s with the Siemens' injectors too?

Aha, good info to know. As I have a 1.9 I have kind of never bothered to know when the 2.0 went over to common rail and when the PD injectors were phased out / 170hp engines brought in.

I prefer the look, both inside and out. Purely subjective of course, but that's why I bought the A3 not the VW.

In the same vein, why buy the VW when it's more expensive than the Seat Leon and Skoda Octavia ???

I would guess then that the people who pay the premium over the Golf for the A3 must have their own reason then :-)

Also Skoda Octavia vRS Tdi was 2.0 PD 170 in the ealry days

Linked to this thread I’m pottentially in the market for a 2.0 diesel mk2 Leon or mk5 golf. I am ideally looking for a 170bhp model of either but what’s the main differences between this and the 140bhp models and would it be straight forward to chip/map either engine for higher boost/more power without other modifications. Buying approx a 05 to 07 car is it likely to have reliability problems with this engine more than any other VAG diesel.

My understanding is that this was a mistranslation from the orginal German Service Books. They recommended 115,000 km which converts to about 70,000 miles. And in some early service books this was displayed as 115,000 miles. Certainly this was the case with the TTs.

I also know of at least three TTs that went bang at about 65,000 miles.

I may be mistaken, but I think the earlier 1.9 PD engines were more reliable - while it may be the variable service interval that's to blame, there seems to be a lot of later ones failing prematurely.

I had a 2002 Golf 100 Tdi (ATD engine) that had got to 97K miles and looked as if it would do another 97K without problems. Unfortunately, a large cobble cracked the sump and, as I needed a car to take my late mother to hospital etc, I bought a 2008 Bluemotion with the BLS PD engine. That engine blew big time in January at around 120K miles and I couldn't find a used one locally - apparently there's almost a waiting list for them!

Annoyingly, both cars had full main dealer service history when I bought them - though the dealers that did the old one were pi$$ poor (I had a lot of fettling to do!) and had fixed service intervals (sometimes exceeded). The second one has an immaculate history from a different dealer and a computer printout from the leasing company that "owned" it! That includes wiper blades and light bulbs!! However, it had only had three oil changes in its first 112K miles and a cambelt at something over 70K (I can't remember exactly and the book is in the car). I had the oil changed within a year and it was due another just before it "blew up" (3000 miles later!).

Ironically, I had put a second cambelt on the old Golf a month or so before the mishap (so about 50K between changes) - it was due as it had been five years since the previous change, not because it had done the miles.

We have a 1.9 PD Seat Leon. It's currently sitting on 379,000km and the engine's still going strong.

The clutch is really starting to go though, and the turbocharger has had some kind of valve issue for the past year that we've not bothered fixing as it's not worth the money. Sometimes when the turbo cuts out on the motorway it's annoying, but otherwise the engine is as people have said, pretty bulletproof!