Audi A6 BiTDI turbo failure

[DanPhoto]

Interested in people's thoughts on this one.

Three months ago I bought a 2012 A6 BiTDI. Fantastic car, but an engine management light came on a couple of weeks ago. Had that checked by an Audi specialist and the news is bad. Its a turbo fault. They also said the turbo sounded noisy. The turbo in these is exotic so the unit itself is around £4k and labour is of course on top of that.
I got a warranty from the second hand car dealer, and I'm looking into that, but I'm not confident a turbo will be covered, especially at that cost.
I have some recourse with the car dealer, if theres a possibility that the fault was there when he sold it to me (probably very likely), but I would expect that to take a long time to be resolved, if at all.

What do people think? Have you heard of this before on the biturbo models? The car is under 5 years old and has done 75k miles. Will I have to swallow the cost (and eat beans on toast for the next 5 years)?

[DanPhoto]

shtu said:

£4k? Naah. Pretty sure it's this one,

http://www.darksidedevelopments.co.uk/products/new...

Get the car out of the dealer and into the hands of a local indy, and supply the turbo. You'll at least be able to afford Heinz.

If only.... But thats just a standard turbo for the non BiTDI model.

The only place I can find one of the BiTDI blowers online with a price is Ebay:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-GENUINE-Garrett-Turb...

And its with an Indy at the moment. They're Audi specialists, but they're not Audi.

[DanPhoto]

Cheers for the thoughts, people. Some good options here.
I hadn't considered the remanufactured unit, mostly because I want to keep the car and wouldn't want to use anything sub standard - but you can't argue with the price difference. And the first place I checked offers a 12 month warranty.
I'll see where the warranty on the car gets me and then consider my options from there.

[DanPhoto]

Keano81 said:

did you get any resolution to this?

Still up in the air. There was a Technical Product Information (TPI) bulletin on problems with turbos on Audi BiTDIs. So right now the car is with Audi and I'm hoping they diagnose it and fix it as part of that. The indy I took it to were pretty confident the turbo was in bad shape so I might be being optimistic. I will update this thread with any new detail though.

[DanPhoto]

Witchfinder said:

Did you get anywhere with this, or did you throw yourself off a cliff rather than face a £5000 bill? Curious, as I'm about to embark on BiTDi ownership (with an RAC warranty), and it'd be interesting to know if this is a likely problem, and how well Audi have treated you.

For those interested in how this turned out....

I've now got my car back, all fixed and running fantastically. It went to my local Audi Dealership in the end and they confirmed the turbo needed a replacement. The total bill with labour costs would have been iro £6 grand, but they offered me some goodwill and I got the work done for a lot less. The turbo was shipped in from Germany, which took a while.

I get the impression the problem is rare, which probably helped them decide to help me out on the cost. That and the car had always been serviced at Audi and was under 5 years old.

Very pleased to have the car back.

[DanPhoto]

fafafa said:

Hi, I'm going through this at the moment. Dealer says it needs a new turbo but it's only done 49K. They've offered a discount off the 5500 quote they gave me but I'm still not too happy about the amount after the discount, given the mileage and age. Do you mind me asking how much you had to pay and how you went about negotiating it? Cheers.

Edited by fafafa on Sunday 26th August 14:00

Sorry to hear that. From memory I paid somewhere between £2.5 and 3k when all was said and done. Its a lot, but when you're staring down the barrel of £5k+ its not too bad.
When I looked, the turbos by themselves seemed to invariably cost upwards of £4k. Although you could spend less if you were happy to go for a reconditioned one.
I've still got my BiTDI and its been flawless since the turbo was replaced.

[DanPhoto]

fafafa said:

Thanks for the response. They've offered to do the work for 3500. I've opened a case with Audi to see if that gets me any further. I was told the part costs 4.5K ( + 5 hours labour) but I suspect the cost to Audi is less than that. I'm a bit disappointed that it's gone at 49000 miles, I'll see what the Audi Customer Service Rep says.

Theres no way they should be happy it failed in under 50k miles. I don't believe they could argue its normal or acceptable. Provided you've always had the car serviced at Audi you'd like to think theres some leeway with customer loyalty.

I took mine to a very good Audi independent for a second opinion and they couldn't improve on the price because they would get the $4.5k turbo from the same place as Audi. Their labour was cheaper, but thats a small part of the total cost.

So again, I was very happy when Audi offered me the reduced price for goodwill.

When it comes to selling it on, its a positive point to say the turbo was brand new at 50k miles and fitted by Audi, I guess.

[DanPhoto]

deanwarren said:

My Bitdi has just had this diagnosed, £5453 2012 125k but full audi service history bar the last service at 125k

There seems to be a reasonable track record on this thread of Audi offering 'some' goodwill on replacing the turbo. But, as far as I can tell, Audi don't offer the biturbo option on any of their current line up. So maybe its no longer in their interest to maintain its reputation (??)

Let us know how you get on.