I have yet to look to see what’s involved but asking the group if it’s a DIY or can it be a DIY. How hard can it be?

 

60,000 mile inspection is the one major inspection.

Ultimately you may be able to do it yourself. I just find it interesting that you have chosen to have the only real "major" inspection on the Audi's service schedule be the one the you break out your toolbox for.

Also the 60,000 mile inspection is the first HV battery inspection. They don't pull it and put it on a balancer and you could certainly do the inspection yourself if you buy a few tools, just pointing out that this is the first inspection they pull battery cell logs etc.

 

A few notes on this...

1. You need some fussy scan tool to clear the service needed message. I used OBDLink and Carista to finally get it I think.
2. Jacking the car up safely ended up a pretty major orchestration and I had to get a new jack and 3d print some jack pads (they are cheap on Amazon too). I have a whole thread on that here somewhere. There are only 4 jack points on the car, and it is HEAAAVY.
3. The rear gearbox fluid change is pretty straightforward. You need the Audi gear oil (that looks and smells like most other premium gear oil). It is like a typical manual gearbox oil change with an extra step.
4. Take off the screws for the cover (lots of them).
5. Drain from a bottom plug, put it back in, fill from an upper plug until it overflows. Then, unlike a normal car, they want you to the wait 10 minutes then come back and pull another 90ml from the top. The Lemons manual did not describe this step for my 2019, but it seems to be in the Audi manual.
6. You can also inspect and drain the coolant tank back there while you have that cover off. I hit it with the hose as well, quite a bit of grime had accumulated. I fully documented the levels (I had a lot in there for 55k miles, it was just about full, which might be really not good).
7. The front gearbox oil change is a lot more to do. You have to remove a subframe section, which apparently also has a specific torquing sequence for reinstallation, and a lot of big bolts, some with fussy heads (the star female bolt heads) that I will have to chase a special socket for. And get the torque sequence and steps.
8. The front coolant drain is just a plug on that front motor, and that plug is supposed to be a sacrificial torque to yield part. And there is an inspection there needed as well to look for flowing coolant, or an accumuation of dried coolant. I don't know what is "bad", what is "good", or what looks bad but isn't actually that bad (like a car that burns a lot of oil, but does so happily for 150k miles with no issues, of which I have had several).
9. The CV boot inspections are straightforward once you get the covers off front and back as well.

So, a list of parts to get, and to solve the jacking problem I had to get a new jack, pucks, and build (reinforce in my case) 2x4 cribbing to support the wheels. And I had to do the lift in two stages (on to a 6x6, then put on the jack height extension, then high enough to get the wheels on the cribbing). Don't forget to put the car in "tire change" suspension mode before you start. And if it locks while you are jacking it, the alarm will go off multiple times. It really doesn't want to be stolen...

 

Is the HV battery inspection something added on newer/Q8 models? Because I thought it was on the OG and apparently it is not (at least for the USA market).

 

Seems to me that unless you're a specialist, we're well beyond the point that you can properly service cars, especially EVs, yourself anymore.
Google says 60k Etron service is $600-1200 from a dealer. I'm guessing a local Audi specialist would charge a lot less if you're near one.
If you miss something, or don't use the right diagnostic tools in the right way, it can get a lot more expensive that whatever you actually saved real fast.
Also a DIY service doesn't show on the service history if you ever want to sell the car.

 

Maybe an issue for a $80k car, but not so much for a $19k car. lol

 

A replacement motor (because you didn't drain the coolant catch tank or didn't know how much leakage indicates a seal problem) is the same cost for an $80k car as a $19k car. Actually maybe cheaper for an 80k car because you'd spend the (say)15k but you may decide its not even worth spending 15k to repair a 19k car so you'd be nominally 4k down. Anyway my point is 600-1200 starts to look cheap against that scenario.

 

Well, my argument is how useful an expensive service history is on a cheap car vs an expensive car, not on replacement costs of things.

I intend to have the dealer check just the motor drains to satisfy the extended warranty on it. I'd rather not pay their shop rate to do anything else.

 

I'd find a path to getting the front and back gearbox oil changed as well, at least I am. That rear has basically just over half a liter total, and that is asking a LOT for a car this heavy to last more than 20k-30k miles (IMHO).

If you do the coolant service yourself (I am, but understand it is a risk), I would (and am) documenting it in ways that are going to be very verifiable (keeping notes, taking pictures, emailing myself the document to a gmail account when the service was done so there is a hard to dispute timestamp on it, etc).

I did have a nearly (but not quite) full rear reservoir for the motor coolant. So I am also not saying the people here saying "do the dealer service and protect the extended warranty" don't have a very valid point. They do.

At the end of the day after a pretty long life, I have almost always gotten screwed by warranties and promises. Either the company knows there is a problem and chooses to make it right, and does so without fuss. Or they don't intend to make it right, and then they just work their way down a list until they find a reason not too. If they want to screw me, they can succeed with or without them doing the service, and my only recourse is to start a protracted battle that I don't enjoy.

And if geoffdaddy has a 2008 mini cooper S with 166k, his tolerance for mechanical risk exceeds all of ours. I have a 2005 mini S, which was the "reliable" one, and its been a hobby for sure.

 

Haha, well, mine is an R52 S (convertible), so same generation as yours, so should be just as "reliable" as yours. It was bought to be a fun project car (and it is), but I certainly wouldn't want to rely on one for daily transportation, mainly because parts aren't readily available near me. I had another 2006 R52 base model with similar miles that I had to replace a burnt exhaust valve on. It was almost comical the number of failed attempts I had to order replacement valves for that job (two different parts houses kept forgetting to send or sent the wrong thing instead). Having a local parts supplier is good in case you can't wait.

I think you overall made some great points. I figure as far as the motor warranty goes, I'm willing to take it to the dealer just to have it documented there and shouldn't have to be done more than every 1.5-2 years anyway. It is stupid easy to check the rear coolant cartridge. The front motor drain is a bit of a PITA. We had issues with our air conditioning which thankfully the dealer repaired under good will, but suffice to say I don't think they did a great job of reassembling the dash when they were done (I found about 10 missing screws and clips all around which I had to replace) and some marred plastic pieces because they weren't careful, untightened 12V battery clamps, half a gallon low on coolant after the repair, and this was at an Audi dealer so they SHOULD be the experts. Nothing in the maintenance schedule is any harder or that far outside the norm you'd expect on a typical ICE maintenance schedule (except for the motor drain inspection), and that certainly isn't rocket science. On the motor front I just prefer to avoid a potential fight later if I can. If it were out of warranty I wouldn't bother and do it myself.