Irritating service problem

[martin998877]

Hi

My 2016 GTi had done 14000 when I bought it from a VW main dealer last August, a year later it has done 31,000.  It had an oil service at 13K and has counted down on the variable / long life service system to now, when it wanted an oil service. The oil did 18k which is the maximum, as I drive on the motorway which stretches the life of the oil under the variable system.

So, service for £240 (just oil and filter and fluids, spark plugs will be £130 when it reaches £40,000), squeezed in before the used car warranty expires but all was ok. I got home and looked at the Car status and the next oil service is due in 364 days or 9,200 miles.  (There is an interim service due at 8,500 too). So they have messed it up - even if they had switched it to fixed time + distance oil servicing it should have said 10k miles to go.  But I wanted it left on variable as that suits the higher mileage I do so it should have said maybe 14k, which would stretch out towards 18k as I drive it on the motorway regularly.

I rang the service department - it seems its MY fault for not saying I wanted to continue with variable long life oil servicing schedule.  And there was no answer about why even fixed interval was set to 9,200 instead of 10k.

Just moaning. But it's annoying as I now have an 80 mile round trip just to get the service schedule reset.

Martin

[Rob_benton]

Yep happened to me too with my Vw Touareg.
Have you got a dealer closer or just go to any local garage and get them to do a reset to variable?
Vw would have used the same oil anyway so you haven’t missed out on anything.

[SRGTD]

I got home and looked at the Car status and the next oil service is due in 364 days or 9,200 miles.  (There is an interim service due at 8,500 too). So they have messed it up - even if they had switched it to fixed time + distance oil servicing it should have said 10k miles to go.

Time and distance servicing on VW’s in countries that measure distance in kilometres is 15,000 km’s. Even though we don’t use km’s in the UK, the car still uses km’s to count down the distance to the next service if the service regime is time / distance, and it then converts this to miles. 15k km’s is around 9,300 miles, which is probably why your car is showing the next oil service is due in 9,200 miles time (assume the reason it’s showing 9.2k rather than 9.3k is because you’ll have driven your car home from the dealers, and perhaps it reduces the distance in 100 mile increments).

Still doesn’t explain why the dealer reset the service regime to time/distance; long life / flexible service regime is the default from the factory, so I don’t see why the dealer would’ve taken it upon themselves to change it when you’d not asked them to.

[fredgroves]

They programmed mine once to "garage queen" service intervals - its only a programmed setting for the on board computer.

I moaned and they set it correctly.

Just sausage fingers with the tech....

As others have said, it makes no difference to what they actually do mechanically.

[Rob_benton]

They programmed mine once to "garage queen" service intervals - its only a programmed setting for the on board computer.

I moaned and they set it correctly.

Just sausage fingers with the tech....

As others have said, it makes no difference to what they actually do mechanically.

But Vw to charge extra for the variable as supposedly they check more ....

[DaveA]

I find this whole idea of choosing between the two systems a bit daft... Surely the limiting factor is oil lifetime and you can set a mileage for that (under day to day and/or high/motorway miles) and say X,000 miles or X years, whichever comes first, to cover the low mileage users... It seems daft (and confusing) to be picking from one or the other...

Mine is a low mileage vehicle, so it's really once a year and just do inspection and oil at the same time... But annual oil changes on low mileage cars seems a bit excessive with modern oil technologies...