yjeong

Greetings,

I am considering picking up a used 2012-2016 S4 manual as my first Audi. After owning American and Japanese brands, I am thinking about breaking into the German scene. Of course when you are wanting your first German sports car, it feels overwhelming. I was originally considering an A4, but I realized that finding a manual one with the Sport seats is harder than finding a manual S4. Plus considering my 3 previous cars that were V6's with at least 270HP, I think I would be disappointed with the power in the A4.

I am willing to go anywhere in the nation for a decent one I like. Audi CPO would be ideal, but I am also considering buying one from a non-Audi dealer after having the Audi dealer inspect it.

1. Can I purchase a warranty from Audi, even if the original warranty expired?
2. If I buy one with around 40-50k miles, what are the things that I need to look out for right away?
3. How reliable are these cars? I have owned Acura, Cadillac, and Infiniti and they were reliable. I drive around 20k miles a year, mostly interstate commuting. Any major problems with these cars down the road past 100k+ miles? Any model years I need to avoid?
4. How much do you drive a year and spend yearly on maintenance/repair if you are not a DIY'er?
5. My previous manual car was a 2006 Acura TL and the clutch was solid when I sold it after 100k+ miles. Do these cars have high or low clutch engagement point? If it does go bad, what is the replacement cost?
6. I personally don't care for the sport differential and would be ok without one. Do these ever go bad?

Most likely I will have more questions later.

Thanks for all the good help in advance.

Snowmonkey

I was in your exact shoes last year, looking for the exact same thing and asking the same questions. I read and greatly appreciated the same advice from DrGP.

I finally found my unicorn in Pittsburgh, 900 miles from where I live. Black on Black, with all the good options.

The biggest piece of advice I can give is get an independent 3rd party inspector to check out the car. I got hold of a guy who used to be the head of race teams for BMW, Audi, and Mercedes, and has been doing inspections and vehicle valuations for decades. I didn't trust the dealership for one second to say if the car was in good shape or needed work, because they have every reason in the world to lie to me about it, and Ed didn't. payed him 90 bucks, he spent an hour and a half looking the car over in the lot, checking brakes, suspension, powertrain, ran engine codes for faults, did underbody inspections, and then pulled out his black book of vehicle values and gave me some numbers to work with to try and get the dealer to lower price a bit. He identified any problem areas, took the car for a test drive for a few miles to get a feel for anything and see if there were any worrying noises or steering/suspension inputs. He knew about the 3.0 TSFI engine and its possible faults and helped to explain to me and the sales guy what they mean and how they can impact the car, what and when to replace certain parts. He really was a car buyers dream. 10/10 would recommend again. Another thing to consider is how it was driven. Mine had 86k miles on it but the previous owner had a huge daily commute, so the car was in fantastic shape, whereas another I was looking at had wheel rash, balding tires, and based on the service records, was already on its second clutch at 37k miles. Ill take the welkl taken care of car with higher mileage than a low mileage car that was driven hard and put away wet.