Audi A4 Avant (B6) | Shed of the Week

Acid can be dodgy stuff. You truly you should not want to be consuming it except if it is really acetic acid on your chips or citric acid in your G&T. In the times when Mrs Shed well prepared jam sandwiches for Shed’s lunch he frequently picked up a whiff of more powerful, much more industrial acids when he opened the Tupperware box. He’s hardly ever been capable to demonstrate anything in a courtroom of regulation but he understands for a actuality that she at the time put neat bleach on the bathroom seat just before his morning constitutional. This resulted in some unseemly foaming of the undercarriage and a reasonable amount of screaming.

Human skin is acidic, fortunately only pretty weakly so, but when you look at lots of German autos of a selected age you do speculate about its chemical interaction with the coating they employed to set on switchgear and the like. Quite substantially like Mrs Get rid of, that rubbery things seemed to respond fairly improperly to human touch.

Present-day sub-£1,500 featuring, an Audi A4 Avant, is a fantastic case in point of this bizarre phenomenon. The coatings on quite substantially all its sensitive feely surfaces – switches, gearknob, steering wheel – have deteriorated terribly. The relaxation of the proposition appears to be borderline remarkable although. Why? Simply because this is no prevalent or garden 1.8 petrol or 1.9 diesel A4. It’s a 3.-litre 30-valve V6 petrol, which places it suitable behind the 4.2-litre V8 S4 in the gen-two A4 pecking get.

When new, you could pair that 3. motor up with a 5-velocity guide gearbox or a flawed and troublesome Multitronic CVT vehicle, both of those of which would be entrance-wheel motorists. You could have it with quattro all-wheel travel and a Tiptronic vehicle. Or, if you had been a powerfully-developed PH director variety clambering tricky up the greasy pole of existence, you could have it with the quattro and a six-speed guide box. Saints be praised, that is the a single we have got below today.

You had been performing properly if you experienced any sort of B6 A4 Avant as your organization motor back in 2003. Even a primary model was regarded as a interesting and considerate selection. The 3. was the IDGAF preference. It poked out 217hp at a lofty 6,300rpm and 221lb ft at a much more useful 3,200rpm. That was ample to push its properly resolved 1,570kg form along at 150mph, en route to which it would likely have coated the -60mph sprint in 7.1sec.

If the B6’s famously hard seats could discuss, they could possibly now be declaring ‘told you we were being right’ mainly because the finest portion of two a long time after this automobile rolled off the line there is pretty little use or bolster subsidence on clearly show. They’re not leather, which is a disgrace, but if they experienced been the inquiring price would most probably have been a lot more than £1,490.

Assuming you can manage the running expenditures on a 3. six – the gasoline will disappear at the fee of 25mpg if you happen to be fortunate, 20 or fewer if you’re not, and the tax is £360 a 12 months – what can you expect to go wrong? Perfectly, if you listen to a ticking from the top rated conclusion it may well be that the cam lobes are worn. That mostly impacted 2002 automobiles but was not limited to them. The timing belt, drinking water pump and thermostat definitely wanted to be transformed every 75,000 miles, and that was not an straightforward or a low-priced career. The PCV method could clog up and vacuum hoses rotted for enjoyment. Diffs could leak, coolant temperature sensors and catalytic converters conked out, wheel bearings died and of class coils blew.

At larger 100k-as well as mileages you necessary to keep an eye on the gas pump and dual mass flywheel. Frequently talking having said that the motor is a reliable and steady device that, apparently, responds properly to supercharging. Within, B6 glove packing containers are famous for breaking. Spherical the again, subframes and flooring rust. So do the wheel arches. Handily there has been no point out of corrosion on any of the past MOTs likely again to 2007.

The present MOT on this automobile is good to the conclude of August and has just two minimal advisories on it, just one for a much less than best steering rack gaiter and one for a non-extreme oil leak, which almost certainly clarifies the existence of the oil bottle in the boot. That is strange for one particular of these truly. The oil leak, not the bottle in the boot. Drop keeps a bottle in the front of anything he drives but in his scenario it normally incorporates supermarket-manufacturer brown ale.