Thing is Robin you could replace your brake pads every year / 10k miles. It would be preventative mainenance and all that good stuff but I'm guessing you don't. Because that would be daft. You would be needlessly replacing them outwith a reasonable replacement cycle. Caveat: assuming no boy racer / granny driving etc etc
Nope - you still completely miss the point. If you left your brake pads until they were completely worn out, then OK, this certainly is NOT recommended. However, if you
were to, your brakes would still work, sort of, the car would still get you from A to B (when driven very carefully). And you would still need to pay for the cost new brake pads, and also the cost of new brake discs too - so not really a huge difference in prices. But you havn't really been inconvenienced by not being unable to use your car.
But if you leave a cambelt on 'til it fails - it
WILL cause major catastrophic damage to the car. Firstly, the car will NOT go anywhere - the engine will NOT run, and it probably wont even turn over on the starter motor. In MANY instances, when a cambelt fails, the engine usually locks up solid - imagine that when doing 70mph in lane 3 of a very busy motorway on a bank holiday, or late one night when your wife goes to pick up the kids from footy training, or whatever. When a cambelt fails, you WILL be presented with a bill for at LEAST £1800, maybe £2500 to £3000. Not to mention all the time and inconvenience without the car.
Pay the fcuking £300 every 4/5/6 years, and get the cambelt changed - BEFORE the engine goes bang!
You can accept the dealers line without question - and it is the safe / conservative way to go. But frankly they are asking you to do work which is unnecessary. In your case i think you had it done at the sensible mileage. But many of us are no where near 60k after 4 years. Its the 4 years I have a beef with.
You are splitting hairs now, and getting bogged down as to weather peeps will do certain miles in a certain timescale. Volkswagen do NOT write out an 'individual service plan' for every single car they sell. They use a 'one size fits all' (actually two, the LongLife and the T&D), so if you refuse to accept the manufacturers own recommended maintenance issues, be fully prepared for ALL the consequences of when things subsequently go wrong.
Of course cars cost money to maintain. But VW, with the 4 years cycle are taking just a little pee out of their more naive customers.
You may be spot on, or maybe not. We just do NOT know what the 'fail cycle' of the cam belts are - only Volkswagen Germany know that, along with their official importers in other countries such as Volkswagen UK.
But if you are so adamant to continue to stake your claim that VW UK are taking the piss, then make an official request under the Freedom of Information Act, and ask for the specific "Mean Time Between Failures of the timing belt on all variants of the two litre FSI turbo engine", and let us know what their reply is.
