how long should a clutch/gearbox last..

G_M

4 year old Audi with an automatic (S tronic) gearbox. It's developed problems and is booked in for diagnosis/fixing.

If the clutch needs replacing it's arond £750. If the gearbox, around £4000

My question is around 'fitness for purpose' under the Sale of Goods Act. I accept the 3 year warranty has expired, but personally I (and I think any reasonable customer) would expect an Audi to be built to last longer than 4 years/47K miles.

To complicates matters, the Audi dealership I bought from (and thus would have to claim for under the Act) is 100 miles away, so it's a different dealership doing the repair.

Thoughts? Do I just have to suck this up? Or kick up a stink? And if so, with who? Original dealer? Repairing dealer? Audi UK?

Strider590

G_M wrote: »

4 year old Audi with an automatic (S tronic) gearbox. It's developed problems and is booked in for diagnosis/fixing.

If the clutch needs replacing it's arond £750. If the gearbox, around £4000

My question is around 'fitness for purpose' under the Sale of Goods Act. I accept the 3 year warranty has expired, but personally I (and I think any reasonable customer) would expect an Audi to be built to last longer than 4 years/47K miles.

To complicates matters, the Audi dealership I bought from (and thus would have to claim for under the Act) is 100 miles away, so it's a different dealership doing the repair.

Thoughts? Do I just have to suck this up? Or kick up a stink? And if so, with who? Original dealer? Repairing dealer? Audi UK?

Seeing as the vast majority of Audi's are sold on 3 year finance type deals, they don't really need to make the car last much longer than that. By the time it starts going wrong, the customer will be onto their next car.

Iceweasel

You're a bit short on the info here -

What model is this?

Then:
How long have you owned it?
Is all the service history at Audi dealers?
What warranty did you get from the selling Audi dealer?

Depending on the above I would expect it to be covered by an approved used car warranty for at least a year from your purchase date.

If it has full Audi service history but no warranty the very least would be 50% goodwill.

colino

Have you driven it from new, or has a drag racing fiend taken all probability away from you from claiming a manufacturing defect?

ManAtHome

Could be just a transmission fluid change needed (hopefully, about the right mileage for it). I've had Rovers and Fords over 80k (still running ok when traded in), would have been extremely miffed with a dead 'un even at those mileages.

arcon5

Well your rights would be with the selling dealer unless they are the same company which it is unlikely to be.



Unless you've trashed it I'd say it was reasonable to expect a contribution - arguably in the region of about 30%

Guest101

I think step one is letting the dealer try to repair, so you need to ring them asap.

SOGA - from recent experience is, repair, replace, refund - in that order.

IamNotAllowedToUseMyName

To answer the original question, a traditional gearbox is a lifetime sort of a deal on a car, though it depends on brand. I would certainly expect a gearbox on a reasonable quality car to be 100k+. Without knowing how a car is driven, there are reasonable things that can happen to damage a gearbox.

A clutch, again depends, but a traditional clutch should be good for a very long time, and modern clutches do seem to be moving towards "life of a car" - our 12 year old Golf clutch is at 85k and no signs of dying even though it has an abused life of little old lady followed by two learners and another driver who was so used to automatics that the clutch was often treated as an option on gear changes. The gearbox has a wonderful clatter in reverse, but as that was present at 10k, I am not stressing over it, even though garage mate has been hoping to change it for the last 50k!

With a DSG, then you have new technology and I am not entirely certain what the likely failures are. I would think that it is in the nature of s-tronic that it is beyond your control how it wears and I would agree that it is a premature failure.

If it is going to end up a major repair, I would ask that Audi inspect it before repair as it would be reasonable to expect a contribution on that sort of mileage.

Companies like Audi do not engineer for first user lifetime, it is bad for their reputation not to have their products to have a good resale value due to poor long term reliability - it also makes them difficult to be competitive on finance. Ford and Fiat both learned the lessons of making cars cheap with short lifetimes back in the 80s.

jase1

IanMSpencer wrote: »

To answer the original question, a traditional gearbox is a lifetime sort of a deal on a car, though it depends on brand. I would certainly expect a gearbox on a reasonable quality car to be 100k+.

Can you define a brand of car that isn't at least "reasonable quality"?

I would be very angry indeed if a gearbox on any car failed before 100,000 miles.

BeenThroughItAll

Plenty of well documented DSG failures at that sort of mileage, hence the opinion of some of the specialists I've spoken to that you should change the oil every 30K at least. S Tronic is I believe the Audi version of DSG, so same rules apply.


I believe VAG stipulate a 40K DSG fluid change, so if that's not been done you may find they don't want to help you. If it's got full VW/Audi history they may offer some goodwill as the change should have been taken care of at 40K.

BeenThroughItAll

jase1 wrote: »

Can you define a brand of car that isn't at least "reasonable quality"?

I would be very angry indeed if a gearbox on any car failed before 100,000 miles.

Renault. We had a fleet of 11 of them at my previous work, one Laguna gearbox lasted 87 miles. Yes. Eighty seven, not eighty seven thousand. 87.


Next worst was a Megane, whose clutch plate disintegrated after just 558 miles.


Looking back at my spreadsheet, we had five other gearbox or clutch failures across the fleet, accounting for 32 days VOR, none of which had more than 75K on when they went back after the lease ended.