maxandtara

If you are on this site, I think you would agree that you are an advocate of preventive maintenance.

I would like to start by getting some feed back on least talked about maintenance

It is non-glamorous subject of water egress.

I believe over the life of my car about 50% of $ expenditure is related to water egress. (I am not including a big$ ticket item related to an audi sun roof drain related class action lawsuit)

1. sun roof drain holes front
2. sun roof drain holes rear
3. plenum drain (engine compartment)
4. evaporator drain

front sun roof drain holes = Yearly or every two years ? (yearly if you park outdoors under a tree) I have the opinion that most of the water usually exits this way.

Rear sun roof drain holes = every 4 years assuming most of the water leaves the front. cleaning this is harder to do as well...

evaporator drain = 75,000 miles or 7 years like your timing belt ?

Plenum drain = clean everytime you replace cabin air filter? or only if you see drebis?

Your 2 cents will be appreciated

I think when I look at the overall repairs I have done to my car.

From my personal experience with my A8 D3, a maintenance/wear schedule would have eliminated 95% of unexpected down time of the car.

dvs_dave

Lubricate the hood latches, cables, and cable splitter. I’ve lost count of the number of “help, my hood release cable snapped” posts.

ScottCNelson

The front sunroof drains and plenum panel are already on the official maintenance schedule.

maxandtara

Lubricating cables and latches,

I will take your advice and lubricate them this weekend. Any special type of lubricant?

I have read some threads relating to this I think the cables failing is more of a symptom.

Reasons why I think the non-lubricated latches causes hood cable failure.

1. Most of the point of failure is on the single cable that pull on the other 2 cables.
2. One of the posts relating to cables mentioned that he was able to reduce pulling effort by about 50% by lubricating these latches.
3. Like the timing belt, people usually see belt failure rather the components causing the belt to fail.

Giovanni Giovino 6.0+6.0TT

Actually it is more that the timing belt components fail rather then the belt itself, like idlers that seize and melt the belt till breakage, or failing belt tensioner, ETC.