Hi all,
Ever since I was a little boy, I've wanted a Golf Gti and I finally managed to buy one last July from Citygate VW Watford. I bought a Mk6 5-door, DSG in black with full leather and sat-nav... a lovely car. The car had around 49k miles when I bought it and had a full documented VW service history. It had a number of fairly minor issues when I took delivery of it and I took it back to Citygate to sort these out (including the tracking being off quite massively - not good coming from a main dealer).
2 months later, in September of last year, I took the car on a road trip to the South of France. One day, I returned to the car park in Nice where I'd parked the Golf, only to find that it was crank but wouldn't start. After a couple of minutes, I tried putting my foot down hard on the accelerator and the car roared into life. Thinking it might be down to the fact that it was in a hot car park, I thought it was odd but didn't do anything more about it.
Over the rest of my holiday, the fault repeated itself a number of times and so on my return to the UK, I booked it into my local dealer (Lookers VW Battersea) to have a look at it. After having the car for a couple of days, they couldn't find the fault and so I took the car back. The fault continued and so I took a number of videos of it happening to backup my claim.
The car went back to Lookers again at the end of the year and they still couldn't find it. Skip forward to this year and the fault was still happening. Even though this definitely wasn't right, I learnt to put up with it. Eventually it started happening more and more and I built up more videos of it taking place. At this stage, I decided to get VW Customer Services involved and they have been liaising with Lookers to get it sorted. Another couple of visits to the garage this year (including one to VW Motorline Coulsdon for a major service where I asked them to look into it - but to no avail) and a month ago or so, Lookers managed to get the fault to repeat itself for them. They thought it might be a temperature sensor and so replaced this. Alas, the fault didn't seem to have been solved and to this day, it is still happening.
I appreciate that an intermittent fault is hard to diagnose but I feel like VW and the dealers are looking at me like I've made this up (even though they've managed to replicate it), hence the video documentation. Each time the car has been in (probably a total of a month since I've had it), it has cost be both time and money as they have charged me for diagnostic time and parts that may not have actually ended up needing replacing. I have been given a courtesy car each time although this has not been comparable to the Golf nor did I buy the Golf to keep taking it in and out of the garage.
I have now got to the end of my tether with VW and completely lost my trust in the brand largely down to their dealers. The last time the car was at Lookers a couple of weeks ago, a couple of days after collecting it, the car broke down and I had to call VW Assistance out (it's still under an extended warranty) who found that the oil breather pipe hadn't been connected properly and had caused the car to misfire.
In any normal situation, I would sell the car and move on at this stage, however I can't sell a car privately to someone knowing that a fault exists. I have had part ex quotes from VW dealers and they are £2.5/3k less than the market value leaving me with a shortfall.
I have now proposed to VW Customer Service that Citygate either take the car back from me or give me the retail price as a trade in against another one. I'm struggling to get anywhere with them and would have thought that they'd be willing to get themselves back into a good consumer/brand position given the recent emissions scandal.
I would massively welcome any help or advice as i'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do next!
