2012 S4 gearbox advice please

[mattb46]

Hi All

I hope no one minds me posting this outside of the B8 owners thread.

We've had a 2012 S4 avant for 9 years now and its currently sitting at 93k miles. Its been an amazing car with not a single thing having gone wrong in that time until now. Its mainly driven by my wife who apart from refusing to ever let it sit and warm up for a few seconds on start up (she is ALWAYS late for everything), drives it very sedately. Its got a Audi FSH and the gearbox fluids were done at 38k and 73k. I had it serviced last week and there were no fault codes. I debated getting the gearbox fluids done early but the Audi tech did not strongly recommend it and he did some kind of clutch relearning reset.

However over the last few months, Ive noticed a slight judder when going up and down between 1st and 2nd, particularly when slowing down. Yesterday when I engaged neutral immediately after start up, the car just wouldn't move- when I tried the gear again it did move but not happily. I also may be imagining it, but it seems to now hold very high gears eg if Im pottering along at 30mph it will be holding 5th gear at 1100 revs. In my ignorance it sounds like I've possibly got both clutch and mechatronic issues? The latter is to be expected I guess. The car is still driveable and mostly ok but I am assuming things are only going to get worse

Its our only car and a big bill now could not come at a worse time financially . I am wondering about best next steps.

One good thing is that i know a Audi master tech who will do private work at the weekends.

Id love to receive any advice re what order to best tackle this problem in:

- would you start with removing the mechatronic unit and having that rebuilt by someone like the company ECU Testing? (or an alternative co if someone knows of a better option). I think their rebuild service is in the region of £430 Plus VAT and carriage
- I believe having the clutch done would be a lot more expensive so perhaps that would be second?


Any advice re best next steps would be much appreciated. Thank you

[Dr G]

Speak with Milta in Bristol who will likely say "suspect mechatronic", which is often followed by "requires clutch pack". They don't seem to like doing one without the other; they assure me they frequently come back for more work when they do mechatronic only.

[normalbloke]

I’ll second Milta, they do know their DSGs.

[mattb46]

Great, thanks very much for the advice

[si_xsi]

I might be completely off the mark but when I've read about dsg resets before, it basically resets it to default factory settings which are likely to include changing up gears at low speeds for optimum economy etc. It therefore needs to relearn you're driving style but I'm unsure how long that process takes, mileage wise.

Are you happy the last dsg oil change was done correctly and did they do the filter too?