V w Passat

Did you see the Primera has a Reliability index of 31 compared to the vw of 90. Just though id mention it to stir the pot a little.

No, the newer model Primera has the low rating. The Primera of the same age group as the Passat has a slightly worse rating than the Passat.

Either way all three models rate under 100 which is a good score and generally denotes vehicles that are plenty reliable in the real world.

Quite correct jazz but what happened in the later model ones. They improved in the next age group down to 70. Then the group after that went back up to 134 sounds like someone stuffed up in the planning department.

A lot of it has to do with how they are rated, you have to bare in mind that the majority of modern cars are very reliable.

So you wind up with something that looks a lot like an Olympic sprint race, someone has to come first but realistically they are all obscenely fast.

Even a car rated at 134 is not in general likely to be noticeably unreliable. Factors like the sophistication of the vehicle and even the target market will easily have that much effect.

You can see this often in the index with vehicles that are mechanically the same but badged differently or are say in a people mover bodyshell instead of a sedan.

I personally rate the later VW/Audi/Skoda's as the very best in direct injected vehicles from a reliability standpoint. We have had half a dozen of them over 8 years and have only had one fault on any of them which was a faulty coil on a brand new one (showed up on first long drive) which was immediately replaced at no charge.

Compare the later Audi's/Skoda's and VW's that share the same platforms (look up PQ35 for the list in Wiki etc). The numbers bounce around quite a bit yet mechanically its all much the stuff.

No, cars that are in the top 50 range would be called very reliable and still being a good choice regardless of what they are. Calling a car rated as 134 as being reliable is like calling a fat kid an olympic sprinter.

ask your mech mates about sump sludge and restricted oil feed
no sludge in my sumps tho, oil changed at 10k, clean lube is good
I learnt to look after my own motors starting mid 70's when I started as an apprentice mechanic

anyone notice when you take a car etc in for a trade in, the first thing the mech looks at is the colour of lube on dipstick!

You are confusing the issue, (which is not surprising since some troll jumped in and completely confused the subject).

You are correct the 1.8T Passat's especially that we are talking about here need to be run on proper synthetic and changed at least every 15K as recommended by VW (as I pointed out already above) or they can sludge up.

The silly childish troll was trying to confuse the matter by making silly personal attacks about my discussing later model VW's in other threads which are designed for 30K + intervals. This is also fine and you don't get any sludging or excessive wear so long as you use the correct fluids and set the computer to use the variable intervals if applicable to what you are doing.

We are talking about very different engines in both cases. What is good and correctly designed for and recommended for one is not applicable to the other.