The car is my 2000 A6 Quattro 4.2 V8. I bought it 2 years ago for $1500. I fixed it up, with emphasis on preventative maintenance. I've kept it going affordably in 20K+ miles of hard driving including winter storms, and two intense days of Virginia City hill climbs at the annual Ferrari club time trials, in which this car came in 2nd, faster than one driver (albeit inexperienced and cautious) in his dad's Audi R8.

Over 2 years, I mainly installed a renewed pressure regulator that I got from the ZF distributor, and I changed the timing belt. I also had the windshield replaced and did the front brakes & front side drive shafts. Aside from that, various little things like a leaky coolant bottle, blown fuse, one control arm, and illegible instrument cluster but nothing that was bank-breaking to fix.

Oh, and of course, my financial contribution to the local coffers for speeding,

I own a used Audi parts business but that isn't as empowering as you might think; the most empowering aspect thereof is knowing what to do, and when to go with a used part, when a rebuilt part, when new aftermarket and when new OEM. I also have a vendor account on here but I haven't renewed it yet this month; I do plan to.

Based on the less-than-alarming error codes from the computer, I'm concluding that this particular chariot is likely to continue to provide high-quality, rapid transportation with no clear end-of-life in sight from my current perspective.

If you've considered owning one of these C5 A6 Quattro 4.2 V8 cars, please don't be intimidated by the transmission “scare stories.” To prevent (for the next 10 or so years, anyway) the most typical cause of failure is easy and with a transmission service included, it costs less than $500 if you do it yourself. After that ... well, this is my test car for the renewed pressure regulator from ZF. I drive hard, in part to prove the transmission can handle it, after this preemptive fix. So far so good.

Also, as to these cars being difficult to work on, I disagree. If you approach working on the car with logic and calm, you almost always find there's some or other trick to it, that makes working on it so easy that it’s downright fun.

Even so, I see people almost giving these cars away; I have bought them in almost-driving condition for less than $1500, sometimes less than $1000. So far I have bought seven of them. I drive the black one and then have a ready-to-roll silver one and white one on ready standby in case the black one ever has a major issue.

Life is good.

 

Good to see you're hanging in there. I sold mine about 6 months ago. I was getting nervous about my cross country trips. Didn't want to get stranded somewhere for days over something as stupidly simple as a radiator hose or similar. I really miss it but life goes on. Cheers!

 

Thank you. It's nice that you're still on this forum, even so :-)

I follow your reasoning. Viability comes down to not just what happens but what we can reasonably expect to happen ...wise words.

~Tanya

 

That and AAA membership with the 100 mile tow option. Accept that you might just have to pay someone else to fix it if you are farther away. Can't anticipate every old item that may give up on a road trip. Or, you will be replacing too many items that may never have failed. Still beats the newer car with all the associated costs and loss of a likely better driving car. Just know your priorities.

 

Last August, I bought the Premium AAA membership, just in case. It's pretty ironic you should have written that. Sunday night, as in 5 days ago, I drove the black car from northern Nevada to Las Vegas, NV ... not slowly. I had a blast. The purpose of the trip was to help my friend who needs an eye doctor appointment and couldn't get one in Reno for another month, whereas in Vegas there was one available on Monday ... so I offered to drive her. (You know you like driving your C5 A6 Quattro 4.2 V8 when you offer to drive a friend 800 miles there and back to her eye doctor appointment). She's an Audi guru so she's extra useful to have around, and she's super nice to me, always helping when my cars break down.

Before leaving northern Nevada she and I tried (and failed) to diagnose a weird vibration, plus an odd noise from the pulley area of the engine (you can probably see where this story line is going).

Anyway, 400 miles of fast driving later, the pulley area was very noisy. We stopped and inspected it, and the crank pulley was wobbling badly. I gingerly drove the last 5 miles to the hotel, and in the parking garage, my friend inspected the black car some more. She also stuck her phone up into the area where the pulley was, and took a video. NOT good news: five of the eight crank pulley bolts had sheared off, and one was almost ready to fall out, doing very little. The two remaining bolts were adjacent, so the pulley wasn't centered.No wonder it was wobbling badly. In the process it had also damaged the belt and some of the timing gear covers.

Oops ... I can guess why. About 18 months ago, when I had done the timing belt work, I'd asked another friend to help me. I had not looked up the torque specs for those 8 bolts .. turns out, they're only supposed to be about 16 ft lbs and somehow I doubt that's how they were torqued. Either he or I overtorqued them, or Audi bolts just magically snap in half. I'm guessing it's the former.

I shut down the engine, and the next day I got a Lyft to Hertz, to rent a car so my friend could get to the eye doctor. When this was done, I called AAA and they had someone show up with a flatbed trailer to bring the black car to a Las Vegas Audi shop, where a nice gentleman was willing to stay late to accept the car way, way after hours ... close to midnight. Turns out he owned a 2003 C5 A6 Quattro 4.2 V8 that he wanted to sell and meanwhile he was OK with lending it to us. So Hertz got its rental car back, and my friend and I had transportation again ... a VERY nice Audi, on which I made a commitment to buy, and a down payment with the black car and some eye contact as collateral.

The next day, Audi of Henderson had some bolts to sell us, and my friend went over to the shop to evaluate the black car. She concluded that the cam gear and pulley were both damaged, so it's not a quick fix. Conclusion: the black car has to stay in Vegas until we can bring some fix-it parts from my stash of used Audi parts. Pretty ironic that right after I announce how solid the black car is, it fails...

Anyway, no matter .. the 2003 C5 A6 Quattro 4.2 V8 drives nicely. My friend and I are now safely back home in northern Nevada, plus I have one more Audi A6 Quattro 4.2 V8, plus more debt yet, plus I have a cool story to tell of the adventure.

... a very typically-Tanya tale, all in all.

 

Murphy's law!!!! Although a bit of an ordeal, you also kind of stumbled into another car for your collection. So I guess it wasn't a total loss and it sounds like the black car is repairable. Think of it as Karma for all the help you have provided on this site.

 

 

Thank you. :-) ... and it was a cool adventure. I got to see in person how AAA works, and how they load an Audi onto a flat-bed trailer. I got to learn more about Audi of Henderson, and I got to see some Lamborghinis up close. I entered the building in the new-car showroom, and then worked my way toward the back of the building where the parts department is ... I took the scenic route,

I can also see how my little Audi empire brings me ever closer to having a Lamborghini empire too, since the VW Group owns both. A first tiny step in that direction is that the vacuum-driven black cone-shaped intake-runner-adjusting parts at the front of my 2000 Audi A5 4.2 V8 engine are very expensive, but they're the same manufacturer's part number as the one used on the Lamborghini Gallargo, and when I buy the Lamborghini version , the price is less than $100 each. Not being intimidated ... that is a good first step. I am guessing that a few years from now I'll find a used Lamborghini Gallargo with its engine blown up due to neglected maintenance, and then I buy it and I tell my techs "it's very similar to an Audi engine, you can fix it" and then they do. Really the most important part of Audi ownership is to learn "I don't have to be afraid of it." It reminds me of a scene in the "Men in Black" movie where the two heroes are facing a huge scary monster cockroach but for them it's all routine work. I like that.

~Tanya

 

I like your reasoning. I agree. In all fairness, I didn't figure it out at all; my friend did but she's immersed in these cars, intellectually, so it shows your point. :-)

~Tanya

 

My 2002 A6 4.2 just turned 200,000 miles and it has been an amazing car. I bought it in late 2008 for $15,000 with 37,000 miles on it. Best car I've ever owned!!
I'm going to start a separate thread about that car.