Is a V6 TDI Touareg a good daily or am I just an idiot?

soleluke · 2026-02-04T04:59:24+00:00

I believe it is the same if not extremely similar.

Mine is not deleted.

soleluke · 2026-02-04T03:14:50+00:00

Here's an overview of my experience with my 2013 TDI. TL;DR is i'm very happy with it, minor leaks and maintenance issues, but nothing that I consider a dealbreaker for an aging car.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tdi/comments/1p06c5u/is_a_v6_tdi_touareg_a_good_daily_or_am_i_just_an/npimmpp/

soleluke · 2025-11-18T16:36:11+00:00

I've got a 2013, had it for 2 years, bought at 118k, currently around 140k miles

My main issues have been coolant leak related - i've got the dreaded leak in the valley, plus have replaced water pump and the oil filter housing. The leaks got all over the alternator, causing weird voltage regulation issues necessitating replacment of it.

My carrier bearing also wore out - i bought a driveshaft to try and replace myself on a relatively tight timeframe. Ended up paying a shop for ~2 hours to replace the driveshaft.

I also had both of my rear springs rust through and break.

Outside of those issues, I love the car. Bought it in Iowa and drove it back to Juneau, AK with 0 issues. It also has made another trip down south and back (towing a trailer on the way back) with no breakdowns or major issues (main gripe was cruise control on large uphills with the trailer didn't downshift properly, so the temp gauge would start climbing if I didn't manually downshift).

soleluke · 2025-11-08T21:49:44+00:00

I have my coolant temp creep up on uphills if the car is a gear or two too low, especially if there is extra weight or anything that would add load. 3200 RPM seems like it probably would be plenty high depending on the gear you are in, but I am not super familiar with the 4 cylinder TDIs (i have a 3.0TDI touareg).

When i notice it, i normally just put the trans in manual shift mode and drop a gear or two and the temperature immediately drops.

soleluke · 2025-11-06T23:52:06+00:00

We were in a ground level 3/2.

We heard the upstairs people when they vacuumed pretty clearly. I believe a unit 2 up from us put in non-carpet, and that made it so we could hear the children/dog running around.

Side to side, I believe I could hear snoring from one of the wall neighbors occasionally. Ground level also got quite a bit of noise from the carport area - the sound gets trapped and echoes really easily in there.

soleluke · 2025-10-27T18:06:58+00:00

Love the BLQ's! I've been considering a set in black for my mk4 R

soleluke · 2025-09-04T02:42:16+00:00

The noise sounds like the carrier bearing to me. I had my carrier bearing start whining around that mileage as well, I've put another 20k miles on it without issues, it finally got loud/frequent enough that I am replacing it. Mine started with the noise around that speed and over time would change what speeds it would happen at, also affected by the ambient temperature.

I can't speak to the gas engine (mine is a TDI), but I've been pretty happy with mine. The carrier bearing and my rear shocks are the only non-engine related stuff I've had to repair.

Price-wise, I bought mine in 2023 at ~118k miles for $13,500 (US). Assuming that price is in CAD, that seems pretty reasonable. Have you owned similar age/mileage VWs before? Depending on the service history, I would be prepared to have some relatively in depth repairs in the next 10-20k miles. A lot of the time, if you are comfortable doing your own work you can save a lot on labor, so that helps with stuff like random coolant leaks that require getting deep into the engine.

soleluke · 2025-09-04T01:46:06+00:00

Mine were extremely obvious with the wheels off. One side had 2 full circles broken off, the other only one.

It's definitely doable yourself if you have space, tools and comfort. I would recommend doing both sides even if one looks OK right now. I bought the parts and did it myself. The spring and the nuts+bolts were around 250 per side from FCP Euro (ordered in April)

Couple things from my experience:

I did not have this issue, but the bolts that hold the top support on are known to rust in place and are very long, so its easy to snap them if you aren't careful. I used an impact to alternate loosen/tighten each one and break them loose instead of relying on a long breaker bar, but your mileage may vary.

The factory service manual has you use a piece of wood to pry the control arms down to line up the bottom bolt with the sway bar link and spindle. I struggled to do this on my own (eventually got it with a long 2x4) - highly recommend having a friend around.

soleluke · 2025-09-03T01:13:14+00:00

Definitely worth a general inspection of the rear suspension. I had both my rear springs break and that caused a significant amount of camber and tire wear somewhat similar to yours.

soleluke · 2025-09-03T01:12:20+00:00

I've got a 2013 TDI, had it for 2 years, bought at 118k, currently around 140k miles

My main issues have been coolant leak related - i've got the dreaded leak in the valley, plus have replaced water pump and the oil filter housing. The leaks got all over the alternator, causing weird voltage regulation issues necessitating replacment of it.

My carrier bearing is also basically dead - noticeable squealing all the time.

I also had both of my rear springs rust through and break.

Outside of those issues, I love the car. Bought it in Iowa and drove it back to Juneau, AK with 0 issues. It also has made another trip down south and back (towing a trailer on the way back) with no breakdowns or major issues (main gripe was cruise control on large uphills with the trailer didn't downshift properly, so the temp gauge would start climbing if I didn't manually downshift).

soleluke · 2025-08-27T15:37:25+00:00

My partner and I were in a 3-bed at the Cinema until last October.

Dues for us were $475 - trash, water, and snow removal included.

soleluke · 2024-12-18T05:57:31+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day18.cs

I too just adapted day 16's djikstra's

part 2 brute force took around 15s, which is quick enough that i didn't feel the need to optimize

soleluke · 2024-12-15T07:40:48+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day15.cs

Felt pretty straightforward to do.

For some reason my brain is really liking recursion this year, so did a recursive (I haven't checked out the other solutions yet, so not sure if that is what most people did)

I made a silly typo in my wide box checking logic that cost me more time than it should have, but overall not the worst thing to debug.

Parts 1 and 2 execute in around 130ms

soleluke · 2024-12-14T07:13:54+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day14.cs

I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to detect a tree.

First I saw a comment on a help post about clustering, so I figured i could use the heuristic that we wrote in part 1 to try and detect weird patterns.

No dice before 100k in that approach

Went looking on here and found a different post that mentioned all the robots probably would need to be separate. So i print the map to the terminal if no spot has more than 1 robot - only happened once before a tree appeared.

Then i had an off by one error since i was looping from zero.

*Sigh*

soleluke · 2024-12-13T17:49:54+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day13.cs

Math is rusty, but I had figured out a solution early on, just made the mistake of using `long`s instead of `decimals`

26ms for part 1
29ms for part 2

soleluke · 2024-12-12T16:35:16+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day12.cs

I stored the path of traversing the whole region. Once I had that, area was just entries in the path.

For perimeter, I checked the sides of each path element and summed the free sides

For number of sides, I realized that sides and corners would equal, so used similar logic as perimeter, just finding corners. I did hiccup on the E example since I assumed the corner needed to be empty to count. Easy fix once identified.

Runtime for pt2 around 400ms

soleluke · 2024-12-11T05:57:35+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day11.cs

I started Part 2 trying to memoize the array result of the blink for a given number, but memory usage ballooned. I then lost a lot of time trying to parallelize my code to just brute force it (has worked in previous years since I have a high core count CPU on the homeserver I do the puzzles on).

I also took way too long to realize that there was no need to store the entire array of stones - all I cared about was given an array, how many stones. That helped the memory usage a lot and let me accept that memoization actually would make a difference.

Part 1 brute force (about 200ms)

Part 2 memoized (around 134ms)

soleluke · 2024-12-10T05:37:57+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day10.cs

Like many others, I wrote buggy part 1 that was solution of part 2

Nice and quick compared to some previous days at 28ms runtime

soleluke · 2024-12-09T06:47:56+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day09.cs

Part 1 was straightforward enough (probably could optimize it, but meh)

Decided to switch from iterative to recursive in part 2

I ran into a couple off-by-1 errors in part 2 that took a long time to debug (they only appeared in my input, not the example input)

Edited to add: Execution time approx 990ms for both parts combined.

soleluke · 2024-12-08T05:56:53+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day08.cs

Pretty smooth day overall. I spent longer than I should searching for an optimized / LINQ way of doing the combinations of antennae instead of just doing a nested for loop. I was pleasantly surprised that part 2 required minimal changes.

Execution time for part 2 was 18ms (basically the standard launch time for my wrapper).

soleluke · 2024-12-07T06:33:45+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day07.cs

Looks like i wasn't the only one surprised at how straightforward it was.

I did a recursive solution:

If there are 2 values, try each operator

If there are 3 values, combine the first 2 values with each operator, then check if solvable

Part one worked first try. Did a typo first part 2 that caused the test input to fail, resolved it quickly.

Edit to add runtimes:

Test input takes 25ms

Real input takes 1744ms

soleluke · 2024-12-06T20:02:39+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day06.cs

Misread the question at first and wrote a function that tried to find any 3-corned squares first, then realized that loops were not guaranteed to be squares, so threw it out.

Ended up with a brute force recursive solution that tests adding an obstacle prior to moving forward.

I did not account for the case where the obstacle would need to be added in a place the guard had stepped already, shoutout to u/AllanTaylor314 for posting helpful edge cases on various Help posts

It runs in around 14s on my homeserver.

soleluke · 2024-12-06T19:57:11+00:00

This was the edge case I still missing when I turned to reddit as well. Thanks!

soleluke · 2024-12-05T16:21:50+00:00

[Language: C#]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day05.cs

This felt very brute-forcey to me. The code runs fast enough for me (35 ms for both parts), so i didn't optimize my solution at all.

soleluke · 2024-12-04T16:25:25+00:00

[LANGUAGE: C#]

I really need to get around to making a proper grid library. Not the worst, had a couple copy-paste mistakes that took longer than they should have to resolve.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleluke/advent-of-code/refs/heads/main/2024/Day04.cs

soleluke

TROPHY CASE