Audi TT Mk1 - not sure why it's got such a bad reputation?
Discussion
Zoon said:
Interestingly all the people who have crashed were speeding!
Chris Meek's example doing 91mph dabs brakes whilst turning left, not even a great idea at 70 mph.
Yes, I pointed this out earlier on but was met with cries that the car was unstable, had poor aero and was generally a bad egg. Chris Meek's example doing 91mph dabs brakes whilst turning left, not even a great idea at 70 mph.
No such thing in my opinion. Certain cars have handling traits which flatter and some don't. It was a case of drivers pushing beyond the limits.
EazyDuz said:
But to put people off said car because it happened to you and no one else is unreasonable.
It has happened to 2 posters in the last 2 pages. If it happens at all causing an acvident then THAT is unreasonable.If your car has to be written off due to it having a malfunction you for some reason believe an owner cannot be critical of it?
What planet are you on?
On a separate note I had a golf v6 4motion and the sensors were always going haywire and needing replacement. The electrics on this era of VAG cars was pretty dire.
s m said:
Looking back, maybe some of the bad reputation came from the handling mods ...rather than the lack of them
We had the initial favourable reviews
Then there were the grumblings that started in the German press....
....and then came out over here
Then came the fixes....
Which some mags were not convinced by
We had the initial favourable reviews
Then there were the grumblings that started in the German press....
....and then came out over here
Then came the fixes....
Which some mags were not convinced by
Completely agreeI always thought the issues with the TT had a big part to play in the increasingly "safe" handling balance of cars which started to creep in around the same time, perhaps by coincidence, but I don't think so entirely. Audi originally built what a lot of respected motoring journalists and skilled drivers called a fantastic drivers car. A few idiots crashed it. Audi were forced to "fix" it by making it duller and more stable.
After that, who can blame manufacturers for sticking to "safe"? Look where it got them doing it any other way.
I notice this was the exact same era when Peugeot lost their handling sparkle / oversteer tendencies as well, and I can't help wondering how much of it was down to what Audi went through with the TT. You can't blame them if it was linked.
AJXX1 said:
Wouldn't put too much faith in the Quattro system. I had a 225 going on for 5 years until driving home from work on the motorway in winter, Quattro seemed to have some sort of fit and the car lost all control and ended up in a ditch. Luckily I was going at an appropriate speed for the weather and am still here to tell the story, no idea what happened - motorway was busy, other cars seemed to handle it without issues, but the TT lost it for some reason.
Car ended up being written off by insurance company as the chassis ended up being bent.
There's 3 things that commonly stop the early Haldex from working properly:Car ended up being written off by insurance company as the chassis ended up being bent.
1) Failed pre-charge electric pump = FWD only
2) Failed ABS sensor = FWD only
3) Failed handbrake switch and / or clutch switch = 4WD stuck on, and you'll notice binding from the rear axle on slow full lock turns.
Numbers 2 & 3 would throw up warning lights on the instruments, warning you of something busted down below.
If you're saying it went mental mid-corner because the 4WD was stuck on 50/50, it's not common, but even then all you're combatting there is a bit of power understeer, which isn't hard to recover from.
To lose the car completely from the 4WD not functioning correctly sounds more like driver error to me. Assuming all was working well, it only ever engaged the rear wheels under front wheel slip and / or hard throttle demand anyway. At all other times the rear diff was effectively free wheeling.
yonex said:
Zoon said:
Interestingly all the people who have crashed were speeding!
Chris Meek's example doing 91mph dabs brakes whilst turning left, not even a great idea at 70 mph.
Yes, I pointed this out earlier on but was met with cries that the car was unstable, had poor aero and was generally a bad egg. Chris Meek's example doing 91mph dabs brakes whilst turning left, not even a great idea at 70 mph.
No such thing in my opinion. Certain cars have handling traits which flatter and some don't. It was a case of drivers pushing beyond the limits.
Audi chose to "upgrade" 40,000 examples of the original TT for free, which is not exactly a cheap thing to get involved in.
Question: If the original car wasn't unstable and had anything other than poor aero, why did that happen? Why did Audi spend so much money they didn't have to?
Everyone on this forum understands that certain cars handle differently than others. That's a given. Nobody expects a TT to behave like a GT3 at 150mph.
In this case it's just a question of "is it an acceptable level of stability" for the TT.
The issue here was that the original TT's high speed handling behaviour was unacceptable, largely due to rear end lift.
It was a styling versus engineering team decision to release the car originally without a spoiler (engineers wanting one, stylists not wanting one).
The stylists won that debate until customer cars started crashing, at which point the decision was reversed and the spoiler was added to all subsequent cars and Audi offered to retrofit the spoilers to all existing cars.
Here's a link to some info about that particular aspect of it. http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/we-take-audis-...
Anyone can have any opinion they like about anything.
I hope we can agree that maintaining that the car was not at fault, and that the drivers were is a pretty marginal minority opinion.
Audi themselves disagree that the car was OK.
As far as I'm concerned personally, I hold that no car should have an aerodynamic trim which causes uncontrollable oversteer at top speed.
Styling/stylists should not have a say in that aspect of aerodynamics. I say that as someone who has taken cars to very high speed in Germany. We're talking about driving cars along a road faster than their terminal velocity if thrown out the back of an aeroplane.
I've driven the original TT (spoilerless) as well as a 190 (Mk.1 FWD with spoiler and less pointy setup) as well as having owned a MK2 for four years. I'm not at all anti-TT. Short of a sports special from one of the french manufacturers, I think my Mk.2 was about the best handling FWD car I've ever driven so long as it was on relatively new tyres. Know this about me while also knowing that I still think the original TT was flawed to a degree where it should not have been made available as it was.
I see where you're coming from with the "there are only bad drivers" opinion, in the sense that I'd quite like the safety labels torn off everything and let darwinian evolution take care of idiocy by wiping out all the idiots.
I don't agree that it took idiocy to kill in a Mk.1 TT. One of the fatalities was a rally driving champion called Peter Hommel - a driver with skill at handling cars well above average or even inside the meat of the bellcurve.
The reason people were posting earlier about the Mark Webber/Peter Dumbreck aerodynamic flips at le mans was basically this: no amount of skill could have saved them because the cars were aerodynamically unstable. That's what happened with the TT crashes and it's the comparison being made (instability).
You can only catch a slide if the wheels are in contact with the ground, and the aero on the original TT was bad enough that you couldn't rely on them being on the ground. That's not the driver's fault. It's the car.
Edited by CraigyMc on Tuesday 29th March 13:09
CraigyMc said:
The issue here was that the original TT's high speed handling behaviour was unacceptable, largely due to rear end lift.
It was a styling versus engineering team decision to release the car originally without a spoiler (engineers wanting one, stylists not wanting one).
The stylists won that debate until customer cars started crashing, at which point the decision was reversed and the spoiler was added to all subsequent cars and Audi offered to retrofit the spoilers to all existing cars.
Which would have been fine if Audi had just nailed the spoiler on to address the dangerous rear end lift at speed, but they went way further. Suspension arms, stabilisers, dampers and geo were all changed which had the effect of neutralising the car at far lower speeds and making its responses softer. The changes significantly altered how the car behaved and responded generally, and made it significantly less satisfying for experienced drivers. As I said before, I don't blame Audi (I would have done the same thing), but I do think it had wider repercussions beyond the TT, and was the reason so many cars launched in the late 90s and beyond played it very safe dynamically.It was a styling versus engineering team decision to release the car originally without a spoiler (engineers wanting one, stylists not wanting one).
The stylists won that debate until customer cars started crashing, at which point the decision was reversed and the spoiler was added to all subsequent cars and Audi offered to retrofit the spoilers to all existing cars.
CraigyMc said:
I don't agree that it took idiocy to kill in a Mk.1 TT. One of the fatalities was a rally driving champion called Peter Hommel - a driver with skill at handling cars well above average or even inside the meat of the bellcurve.
The reason people were posting earlier about the Mark Webber/Peter Dumbreck aerodynamic flips at le mans was basically this: no amount of skill could have saved them because the cars were aerodynamically unstable. That's what happened with the TT crashes and it's the comparison being made (instability).
You can only catch a slide if the wheels are in contact with the ground, and the aero on the original TT was bad enough that you couldn't rely on them being on the ground. That's not the driver's fault. It's the car.
Yes, and he was killed at 120+mph IIRC on winter tyres in wet conditions? Speed seems to be the common factor, excess speed in marginal conditions. Of course this being an Audi, they were going to deny everything, the same as most manufacturers to be honest. I have driven the 225 (post 2001) and found it fairly numb, the feedback was low despite loads of grip. I would say this was the main problem. The surefooted drive from the quattro system once unstuck was always going to make things interesting and so it proved. The reason people were posting earlier about the Mark Webber/Peter Dumbreck aerodynamic flips at le mans was basically this: no amount of skill could have saved them because the cars were aerodynamically unstable. That's what happened with the TT crashes and it's the comparison being made (instability).
You can only catch a slide if the wheels are in contact with the ground, and the aero on the original TT was bad enough that you couldn't rely on them being on the ground. That's not the driver's fault. It's the car.
Edited by anonymous-user on Tuesday 29th March 13:09
There is no link to the Le Mans episode of a car flipping and the TT crashes IMO. How is it that one magazine, with what it seems are oridinary journos can enjoy the original setup yet the car be so lethal that a rally driver cannot keep it on the road?
It doesn't add up.
CraigyMc said:
Speeding? 91mph isn't speeding on an unlimited autobahn, which is where a lot of the crashes happened.
But the example I gave was in the UK so he was speeding. If you read the drivers account of what happened was also down to some very poor driving.
Either that or a very poor way of describing outstanding driving which resulted in him turning the car onto it's roof. (at 91mph)
Someone else had a problem with the 4 wheel drive system 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-35921508
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-35921508
I have recently bought one, 180 quattro, low mileage one owner. Really nice car, not a sports car and not fast by modern standards but a very pleasant way to punt about in the traffic of modern roads or go shopping. The interior styling is unique but it's basically a Mk IV Golf underneath, like the original S3. Full service, some new bushes, tyres and a few odd ends and it's like stepping back in time 20 years. Just something nice to have that's not expensive, a change from the ordinary.
SteveKTMer said:
I have recently bought one, 180 quattro, low mileage one owner. Really nice car, not a sports car and not fast by modern standards but a very pleasant way to punt about in the traffic of modern roads or go shopping. The interior styling is unique but it's basically a Mk IV Golf underneath, like the original S3. Full service, some new bushes, tyres and a few odd ends and it's like stepping back in time 20 years. Just something nice to have that's not expensive, a change from the ordinary.
Interesting to see this thread revived, as I recently picked one up too.I've been a BMW guy for years, never thought I would go for an equivalent Audi, however you can pick a TT up so cheap now they are hard to ignore for a reasonable interesting little bit of fun.
I pretty much just stumbled in to my TT, I wasn't looking for one at all, however one morning I was browsing FB Marketplace, and spotted one locally for £1500, the guy was happy to take my banger of a MINI (2006 One I paid £800 for) in part exchange. An hour after first seeing it on my phone, I gave him £480 and the keys to the MINI and now I appear to be a hairdresser with 2002 a demin blue 180hp Quattro TT Coupe!
Its really surprised me to be honest! Its not fast, just nippy, its doesnt handle the best but still can be fun. Its aged really well in my opinion and is much more interesting than the later TTs.
Don't get me wrong, its 20 years old and for £1280 of course its a bit rough around the edges. Its going to need a new exhaust soon, the wheels have been kerbed within an inch of their life, numerous little scuffs and scrapes but nothing too bad... With a few hundred quid and some TLC, its a lovely little thing to potter about in.
Missy Charm said:
A child born on the day this topic was created would now be in secondary school.
The Mk1 TT has aged quite well stylistically. Are they boring to drive?
I drove a 3.2 before eventually buying a 350z. I have to admit i did find it boring to drive. Nice to look at and sit in though and the noise was pleasant.The Mk1 TT has aged quite well stylistically. Are they boring to drive?
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