Let me tell you a story about a little yellow A4. Or overweight big A4. Same difference. Anyways…
If you’ve never met me or seen my car, I drive a 99.5 yellow audi a4, used to have a K04 and custom tune I did myself. The car is automatic and ever since I bought it, it was the only thing I didn’t care for on the car. However I had saved since I was 15 for the car and I was 17 when I bought it, I wasn’t big on 5spds and knowing that’s what was good. I thought I would be happy with an APR chip and a exhaust and that’d be it, so I wouldn’t pop the transmission. I loved the car 100 percent, and I don’t care if you don’t think it’s that great, but I paid for it all myself and wanted it since I was a young bol so it was all good, it put a smile on my face to drive it, and I learned a lot about cars with it.
As I got more and more into cars from a performance aspect, I made my own K04 kit by tuning the car’s ECU myself (made my own chip) for the K04 and put the boat in the mid 14s all myself, with only 500 dollars invested into the K04 and 100 for the BOV I ran (diverter valve, whatever). Writing your own chip as you may not know, is pretty much unheard of and took lots of work on my part. The car ran great.
I didn’t want to do a T25 junkyard style kit for fear I would pop the transmission, but instead my drive for performance made me try and push the K04 hard. It was nice to have a stock appearance car however, at certain times 
. But soon, pushing the K04 to move the 3200lb automatic car to hit 14.6 came to haunt me. I knew it was going to happen. Pat and I were driving to his house last summer and I heard a wierd clunk…nothing loud, just like the gearbox shifted 2 gears as opposed to 1 at a time…however when decellerating. The car was stuck in 4th, but I parked it at his house 2 mins later and that was it…it came back and all was well. But it did it again a few days later…and those times came sooner and sooner apart. It then happened once, and it never came out of 4th.
I drove around in 4th for awhile, it was actually quite driveable especially with the amount of torque the car had. Until one day it started to stall and the transmission was officially accounted for and done. I took it to Autohaus and that was it. 2K to get it replaced and that was a deal. No doubt it was a good deal for the job, especially from a dealer…but I couldn’t swing that. No way in hell, I was broke. My dad told me that doing it myself was a very dumb thing, and he insisted I took it to BOCES where he works and have it done there. Over and over, argument after argument. It went in September after I gave in, and I found the transmission on ebay for 625 shipped (sick deal).
For me at the time, it was a way to forget about the problems, and have it come back in a few months all done and ready to be sold. It was an easy way out, and I was to get the car in November and that’d be it. November turned to December, and then I got the car back way later then expected in January.
Before I picked it up, I constantly told the guys there that a “UNIVERSAL SCAN TOOL!” would not allow you to add the transmission fluid and you would need a VAG-COM (which I offered to them many times) to help them with the job. Instead I was told the car was “ready to be taken home.” I instead opted to push it to the flatbed while arguing with the guy that there was no way this car was in a condition to drive. I saw it leaking, and he said it was overfilled when I called him out on it. I’m not stupid. He is though, because he told me a week before I picked it up they had used the scan tool to get it to accept the fluid, and then when I picked it up they said they couldn’t read the CEL. Again, I’m not fucking stupid.
When I got it home, it didn’t start. O2 sensors were unplugged in an attempt to swap them (plugs are different for after and pre cat, durrr). Coolant was changed to the green universal shit. Vaccum lines were routed in random ways I would not even be able to imagine. The alignment was so far off there was easily 15 degrees of toe-out. And worst yet…there was less than 1 liter of fluid in the transmission. It was hell. I worked and worked on it, and then I finally got everything done, including a makeshift alignment to move the car. I was happy. I bought myself a Pioneer 6" flip-out to celebrate, install it and tool around in the car for a bit until I could find a cheap 5spd 1.8T to mod out to hell and do what I always wanted to with my auto.
The car made it into Good-Year of EA and I got a phone call from them an hour later. “What’s the trick to starting this thing?” Turns out the battery was dead. A new battery later and it became the alternator in my eyes.
I was so livid, I lost motivation and didn’t touch the car til April. I took it out and took it to be rebuilt, and it turns out they poured that green coolant all down in the alternator somehow. I got a new one and threw it in 2 days ago, finally getting a little motivation over the possibility of a new car. I should just piece this back and sell it, I figured.
No one wanted to help me today, so I put all the vac lines in and started putting the front end back on the car today. After a few hours I had everything in but the front end and I figured I should probably take it for a little spin before I tie it all down…to see what else could be wrong. At this point in time, I felt everytime I worked on the car and accomplished something, as soon as I thought I was done, something else would break. So I figured I should spin her around really slow, take her down the block and back. I needed it mentally, just to ride in it again, as stupid as that sounds.
Well, we all know why people put hood pins on their CF hoods. I have a stock hood, but at 15mph it sure did enough damage when it lifted up, bent the hood, and shattered my windshield going down my street. The sound of it was hell and it made me want to throw up. All this work just for this to slap me in the face…nail in the coffin…etc. And my MAF is dead, my turbo oil line seems to be leaking and it took me 2 hours to fight it to go on, and I want to shoot the damn car because I don’t know what’s coming around the corner. Maybe my eBay transmission is going to fail. Or my alternator I got used. What’s next?
I’m pissed off and that’s my story. I’m done with these. Monday I’m going to put a deposit on a new car, fix this and trade it in. If it wasn’t for Pat, Madan, my mom calming me down, and my other friends, I probably would have torched my A4 tonight, no joke. The transmission is not the first time this car broke randomly. The transmission may be my fault, but I can’t tell you how much I hate going to the dealer to spend 15/litre on trans fluid that I need 9 liters of, or losing a bolt and having it cost 32 dollars. Or the time my hub randomly went and cost 600 and some. Or when my lower control arms failed and the recall “doesn’t apply.” Or when everyone’s trip computer failed and they don’t recall em, but instead cost 600 dollars for another faulty one that’ll die in a year. Or every VW/Audi having a CEL or ABS light on after warranty. Or seeing my best friend’s brand new A4 start on fire a few weeks after he drives it home from the dealer, after fighting to get a car he had cash in hand for since they are so difficult to deal with.
So between parts costs, unreliability, and the overall experience, you can count me out of Audis.
