I’m saddened to tell you dear readers that one of the worst nightmares of private car buying happened over the weekend, and I had a part in it. I sold my ‘Holy Grail’ Volkswagen Passat TDI wagon to a nice guy from downstate. He didn’t even make it halfway home before it broke down on him. I feel so terrible that I refunded the guy some of the money back and now I have a grudge against a car.
Last week, I wrote about the revelation that I don’t even like a car I thought of as a Holy Grail. I spent four years buying four Volkswagen Passat TDI wagons searching for the best one. All of my previous Passats suffered from transmission failures but this one was different. I no longer had to worry about a seemingly glass automatic transmission because this one had a manual swap.
Unfortunately, by the time I found the “right” one I just wasn’t in love anymore. I just sold it to a kind guy who drove hours across Illinois for it. The car began experiencing a possibly expensive problem on him and I feel awful, like I killed the poor guy’s dog or something.
The Car
One of our beloved regular series at The Autopian is Holy Grails. Starting from a running joke after David kept finding supposedly rare Jeeps over and over, Holy Grails celebrates the weird, rare, or special versions of otherwise common cars. We love writing about these cars and you won’t be surprised to read that it’s not just David who chases elusive vehicles.
For more than four years, one of my grails was the fifth-generation facelift Volkswagen Passat TDI with a wagon body and a five-speed manual transmission swap. On paper, these cars were something special. The Passat TDI was the only mid-size car for sale in America with a diesel engine. And since VW had to be weird back then, the Passat’s diesel engine was used in no other car in the VW lineup. These were seriously roomy cars that got over 35 mpg on the highway, had satisfying torque, and sort of sounded like a scaled-down American diesel truck engine. I know 35 mpg isn’t impressive today, but this was back in the early- to mid-2000s here, when the Ford Taurus was a round blob that got 25 mpg on the highway. Also, it rode on a platform shared with more expensive Audis!
I mean, what’s not to love?
Well, as is customary with Volkswagens of the era, Passat TDIs came from the factory with some quirks baked in. The most catastrophic is the balance shaft module, which drives a tiny hex-shaped key that turns the oil pump. This key wears out, nuking oil pressure. If you ignore the oil pressure warning message as a bad sensor, which can happen, boom, you’ve killed your engine.
Another big issue is the fact that all of these diesel cars came equipped with a five-speed automatic transmission and only that transmission. As these cars age these transmissions begin dropping like flies. I’ve now owned four of these Passat diesels. Three of them experienced some kind of transmission failure and one of them experienced the balance shaft module failure.
The fourth Passat TDI wagon was supposed to be one to rule them all; the true Holy Grail. A previous owner of my fourth Passat threw the automatic transmission in the trash and bolted up a five-speed manual from a gasoline Passat. The surgery added some quirks of its own, but a major failure point was eliminated. The previous owner also rummaged around the engine bay and removed other failure points, adding some necessary “bulletproofing” to the powertrain. This was capped off with a tune supposedly from a known name in the TDI world.
Once again, on paper, this was the perfect car. As you now know from my previous piece, I bought this car wearing rosy shades. First, the shades were in the metaphorical sense, then literal. I was willing to turn an eye to the rust, the limo tint windshield, the polyurethane engine mount, and the other red flags because this was the holy grail. I could fix those later, maybe!
To paraphrase the adult animated sitcom BoJack Horseman: “When you look at a car through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.”
Yet, it wasn’t the red flags that did this car in for me. I thought that finally, once I had the holy grail it would be love at first sight. What I didn’t expect was that four years had made me a different person. VWs and Smarts used to be my main vices, now I adore BMWs, Hondas, Suzukis, and have a strong hankering for a Chevrolet Corvair. The B5.5 Passat used to be a Holy Grail to me, but now it’s just an old car with a neat engine and a cool transmission.
Unfortunately, that shocking realization made my rose-tinted glasses come off. Not only could I have a better car, but the one I had wasn’t even that great of an example.
There were few panels that weren’t rusty, the interior fabrics were losing the fight with gravity, and since the previous owner did just the bare minimum for the transmission swap, the traction control, ABS, and cruise control didn’t work, either. Oh, and the previous owner didn’t have much attention to detail. The swap was supposedly done 30,000 miles ago, but the shift knob was physically worn and had worn bushings. Even the boot was totally crap. All of this meant I’d never take the car on a road trip because I like cruise control. The holy grail wagon was instead a local car.
Eventually, I just stopped liking the car at all, which drove me to list it for sale.
The Sale
At first, I thought selling this thing would be easy. People love Volkswagen Passat TDIs and one with a manual transmission is bound to collect interest. Or at least that’s what I thought. I listed the car for $3,500 or trade for a motorcycle and got exactly no interest. $3,500 was about what I paid for the car.
After a few days of nothing but crickets and bots, I dropped the price by $1,000 and that’s when people started messaging me. The messages came in super slow, but the parties were interested. I generally sell to the first person who shows up, and that person would end up being a nice guy who drove about 3.5 hours for my car. That meant a 7-hour drive, or probably his whole day.
I thought I was pretty upfront in my listing. I noted the non-working safety systems, the non-working cruise control, the hilariously bad window tint, the rust, the rough interior, and more. I then offered close-up shots of the rust spots and a video of me driving the car hard through each gear to show that it grabbed strong and pulled strong. And in the best effort to make sure it was ready for sale, I ran hard-driven laps down a desolate country road to see if the car would start complaining. To my eye, it was ready to rock. It didn’t even have an illuminated check engine light.
Sadly, the one thing I didn’t do would come to bite me.
The buyer showed up in the afternoon on Saturday and I went through everything I knew was wrong with the car. The buyer got to see how the hood didn’t like opening and how the clutch grabbed only at the top of the pedal’s travel. He was informed of the gas car gearing and the fact that I put newer TDI wheels on because I got the car with garbage wheels with bad tires.
The buyer took the car for a test drive, came back, and we negotiated $1,950 as the final price. That was less than I wanted to sell it for, but I began to realize this car was not exactly as great as I thought it was. I struck the deal with the buyer and saw him drive away happy.
Or, at least, that’s what I thought.
This Passat Burned Two People
Earlier, you may have noted that I said I never took the car on a road trip. As it turns out, this would burn both the buyer and myself. Roughly two hours or so after the sale, I get a message from the buyer asking me if I’ve ever gotten a flashing glow plug light followed by a hard struggle to maintain speed. Uh oh.
Sadly, since I’ve owned so many diesel VWs I know what some of the warning lights and sounds hint at. A flashing glow plug light means the car’s computer is pissed off for some reason. It could be as simple as a bad brake light switch or a bad sensor to as serious as a failing injector. Either way, the consequence is limp mode. Weirdly, because VW is VW, a flashing glow plug light in a B5.5 diesel may not be a boost issue, even though that angers the computer, too. In my experience, boost issues in B5.5 Passats often trigger a workshop warning message and a check engine light but not the glow plug light.
Sadly, the buyer didn’t bring a scanner with him and he was too far away for me to help if he even wanted my help. So, he didn’t know what was wrong and I didn’t, either. According to his message, the car would trigger limp mode after over 30 minutes of steady highway driving. The “fix” was restarting the engine, and it would run for another over 30 minutes or so before flipping limp mode again. So whatever pissed off the car wasn’t constant. I did take the car on one trip with over an hour of steady driving and nothing happened. Otherwise, any highway trip wasn’t constant because of Chicago traffic. I was and still am so mad at myself for not testing the car’s endurance.
The car never triggered that light under my ownership and while I explained that to him, I wouldn’t fault him one bit for him thinking I scammed him. He was 5 and a half hours into a drive for a car he paid decent money for and it couldn’t even make it home without breaking down. I was horrified as I became the kind of seller I try not to be. If I think my car is a pile of junk I’ll tell you. I just didn’t see this one coming and I felt so bad over it that I felt sad for the rest of the weekend. He didn’t deserve the headaches I accidentally gave him. I also wonder if the bad fuel economy I experienced was related, but I guess I’ll never know.
I’ve been on this guy’s end before. Remember when I bought my first Volkswagen Phaeton? The seller didn’t tell me that the engine overheated or that the air suspension had a catastrophic leak. It broke down on me about an hour-ish into the drive home. My 3-hour drive home turned into a 7-hour drive home. In the past, I was even sold a motorcycle that came with a title that didn’t even match the bike. I get it, and that’s why I try to be better.
So, I did the only thing I could do given the buyer’s predicament: Give him a partial refund. I asked if I could send him $500 and he agreed to it. I didn’t have to do this. Used car sales in Illinois are as-is sales and your only real cause of action against a seller is if you have proof they were lying. Still, I felt it would have been a dick move to not try to make this guy’s day a little better. I told him I thought the car would make it back home and while he did make it back home, having to restart the engine to clear a limp mode wasn’t a part of the deal.
I Hope Everything Is Okay
The buyer never messaged me again and I don’t see the car for sale, so hopefully he’s figuring out what triggered the flashing glow plug light. If he’s lucky, it’ll be a stupid sensor. If so, he got a holy grail Passat for just $1,450, less than half of what I paid for the car.
Either way, this situation now marks four times in a row that I’ve been burned by a diesel Volkswagen Passat. To date, I’ve lost countless thousands of dollars to these cars (well, I could count them but that would be too depressing) in addition to time I will never get back. There’s also the mental equity I’ve put into loving, hating, and being disappointed by these cars. I’ve now firmly landed into the camp that these cars just aren’t good, for me anyway. Reader Shop-Teacher advised me against chasing these cars for a very long time and I wish I listened to him sooner. I may even dislike these Passats so much that I’m not even interested in the legendary Passat W8 for the foreseeable future.
Still, I can’t get over the feeling that I unintentionally scammed someone. My wife tells me “shit happens, you can’t know what you don’t know” but still, I could have maybe figured out the issue was there. Or, maybe I would have dropped the price even lower. There are so many “could have” scenarios running through my head even as I write this. Maybe it’s silly to take the sale of a stupid rusty car so personally, but I guess I sort of wear my heart on my sleeve like that. To the buyer, if you’re reading this I am so sorry. I hope you’re able to make the car work out for you.
(Photos: Author)
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They bought a VW so the remorse transfers with the title IIRC from my German car ownership experience.
$1,450 for an enthusiast car that can mount a tow dolly under its own power isn’t unreasonable.
$1,450 for one that can limp hundreds of miles home is a deal.
I’m sure he contacted you simply to see if you knew of an easy fix for the problem.
He hasn’t contacted you again because he’s excited about the car he just limped home into his driveway for such a prudent sum of money.
$500 back is just icing on the project car cake.
We all know this feeling.
He’s gonna be thinking excitedly about this car in his driveway for days/weeks.
I can’t wait to do this and this and that to it.”
I bet you’re more worried about it than he is.
For all you know he may just have visions of the next Gambler 500 dancing through his dreams tonight.
Definitely get having a conscience, and respect that you didn’t wanna piss someone off. I always worry about selling to a nutjob who will come back and burn my house down.
The couple of times I’ve gotten dinged buying a used car, I normally just resign myself and say “alright, you got me.” Different if it’s a dealer where they have to warranty it, of course.
You are a better person than most Mercedes.
I often sell items through Marketplace, etc., and transparency and integrity are of the utmost importance to me. I love to see when a buyer is truly satisfied and pleased with their purchase. It makes me feel good and it motivates me.
Not long ago, I sold a set of snow tires on aftermarket rims. I listed them with details on tires size and bolt pattern.
I had multiple people ask if the wheels would fit their vehicle. Against my better judgment, I obliged one buyer and confirmed that the hub bores and bolt pattern would work.
He came to pick up the wheels, and after 1 1/2 hours of him standing in my front hallway waiting for his e transfer to go through, he left happy.
A week later, I got a message from the buyer. He says he’s at the tire shop, and the tech tells him the wheels will need spacers to fit, any the tires were no good because they were 9 years old. I let him know the tires were in useable condition with no cracks etc. I would have continued using them if I had the need. (Anyone buying used tires should check the date first, and I assumed he should know this. I was selling them cheap partially due to the age.)
Anyways, felt I terrible. I apologized and assured him that it was never my intention to mislead him, and that I would gladly refund his money.
He appreciated the sentiment, and said his wife liked the rims so he would just deal with it.
Anyways, I learned to never list tires without disclosing the date code in the ad, and to never guarantee fitment to anyone.
I think all of us who have bought VWs know that, deep down, we deserve everything we get.
You didn’t scam anyone. He paid less than $2k for a car and a car known to be unreliable. You didn’t know it was doing that. You didn’t need to give him some money back. But you did. You felt bad. Scammers don’t have feelings!
We always knew you were a horrible person. Something, something journalist (fake news) plus car person. Despicable. /s
Besides, you provided the Mercedes dealership experience. I’m assuming you up-sold them on the butterfly protection coating, You did, right? Didn’t you ?
Don’t feel bad, it’s an old VW, it was going to break shortly after purchase no matter what you did.
I know it feels terrible, but you did all you could (and more). I wish online sellers had half the class you demonstrated in this transaction
If everyone were half as decent as you, Mercedes, the world would be a far, far better place.
You tried harder than 99.999999% of others sellers to be decent, honest, and fair. You have nothing whatsoever to feel bad about.
I drove a one-way rental to Dallas (3 hours) to buy my 1996 XJ12. It behaved flawlessly on the test-drive and all the fluids looked good.
It made it two miles from the seller’s home before the alternator failed.
I had that fixed, and then the transmission gave up the ghost. The planetary gearset exploded.
Now, with all that and some other stuff fixed, she’s purring beautifully (knock on wood).
+1 for Bojack Flag Reference, love it.
+5 for being a nice person
That said, I always make buyers sign a bill of sale that says “As Is”.
I can’t tell you the # of times that’s saved me; one time I had a guy and SEVEN of his friends crawling all over a car to inspect it, they loved it, went for a test drive and the guy launched the thing off from some train tracks. He bought the car and then a day later was then pissed it leaked oil and wanted money back.
I pointed to the AS IS paper he signed, the fact he jumped the car during a test drive, and who knows what he was doing that night, burnouts, more jumps, etc. His problem.
So… you didn’t have to do it…. but…. good on you. Positive vibes make the world go round.
Not knowing what the problem could be, I still feel like $2000 for that car is a buyer’s deal. $1500 is a steal, so don’t give it another thought. But I paid $1200 for a Mk5 Jetta GLI with a blown engine (first kid’s first car), so maybe I’m not a good arbiter of VW prices! But my second kid is still driving and loving that car, so maybe I did ok.
That car isn’t a deal for anyone other than a scrapyard giving you $100 for it.
You’re a class act Mercedes. You didn’t have to give the buyer a dime.
Ahhhh,the pleasant memories of getting rid of my 2002 Jetta TDI that left me stranded at 01:30 on a back road in January of 2010 in Northern Wisconsin after having been gone for 17 days for work.The crank broke believe it or not .Ive never had that happen in any car before but the crank busted between the 1/2 journals and locked up tite ,like right now!
That was the it for that piece of junk,yes it got great mileage and was a ok car up till it hit about 100,000 miles then it became a money pit, then it left me stranded.
No more VW’s except for the air cooled ones of which I have three,one of which I consider the holy grail as it’s a 63 three door split window crew cab truck.
As a former owner of a 1984 VW Rabbit Wolfsburg edition, It was my First VW and my last VW. NEVER again will I own a VW product! The damn thing left me stranded so many times that it still pisses me off to this very day, ۹( ÒہÓ )۶
Long ago, I owned a 10th gen Cadillac Eldorado. The guy I bought it from didn’t mention that it overheated. Driving home, it would overheat if I wasn’t driving 45+. I paid $600 and let it go. Turns out it just needed some more coolant.
I put some miles on, then decided to sell when the starter started requiring some hammer taps to engage and start sometimes. Not all the time, but more often than not needed the hammer. I put it on Craigslist for 1K. Someone came to look. I got lucky and it started on the first try, no hammer needed. The person took it for a test drive. We agreed on $750 and because I was an eager seller, I had the title and pen in my pocket. Signed the title, took the cash, removed the plates. For some reason, the person never turned the car off during this whole exchange and drove off into the sunset. Never heard from him again, but I’m 100% sure that thing left him stranded somewhere.
Not my most shining moment.
I’ve never called a previous owner when a car I bought is somehow not what I thought or hoped, I just suck it up and hope I’m smarter the next time – that said, him calling to ask if Mercedes had ever experienced this seems to me just a guy hopeful for an easy answer/fix for the issue he was having. Giving him some money back was classy, but unnecessary IMHO.
When I sold my super-sketchy 1966 AMC Rambler with hydraulics, I mentioned in the listing that IT SHOULD BE TRAILERED several times. It drove fine around town, but I never took it above 55mph.
Dude bought it and showed up without a trailer. And he was driving it 3 hours home, mostly by interstate. Godspeed you dipshit.
Diesel. Bodged in manual transmission. Holy Grail VW station wagon with several rust resistant body panels. Easily
fixedrepaired by restarting the motor and the buyer didn’t even have to tow it…The buyer should have sent you an extra five Benjamins!My parents sold a car once in the late 1980’s. There was nothing wrong with it that they knew of, but they got a call from the guy about 2 weeks later saying it had caught on fire and burned to the ground. He was wanting his money back and hadn’t gotten insurance on the car, so it did suck for him, but it wasn’t really my parent’s problem either. You were very nice to give him back some of the money. Sometimes it’s just bad luck though.
Red flag 1: $2,500 asking price.
Red flag 2: list of existing issues/problems
Red flag 3: Half-assed MT swap
Red flag 4: obvious poor condition
If this guy couldn’t see the car was a POS he was willfully ignorant. You didn’t owe him any refund and, as was stated below, you can’t unintentionally scam someone. At the price you were asking, I’m just amazed it was running and I wouldn’t expect it to continue to do so.
Do I need to point out that you have zero evidence that the buyer actually had a problem? Not saying he’s scamming but stop beating yourself up over something half-imagined. Plus you disclosed all you could. The stack of issues you raised should have made clear this car was a hot mess, even if you didn’t think of everything. And then you threw him a bone … on TOP of taking a haircut on your asking price.
So, I’d sleep well at night. Buyer got what he paid for.
Another thought I had is how weird it is to me that he contacted you at all and it sounds like he might have been trying to guilt you as if you knew about the problem, though maybe I’m reading too much between the lines. It would never occur to me to call someone with a problem after—even if they were hiding something terrible, it was on me to inspect the car and if they’re that kind of person to not disclose, what are they going to do for me? Scanners and the app are, like $30, so that’s his problem he didn’t bring one on a 3.5 hour drive to pick up a modified, problematic example of a notorious car now at the age where even reliable cars start to have problems for a price where I’d consider the vehicle to be one small step away from the junk yard around here (bottom end where a car has any chance of being relatively OK enough to pass inspection is probably around $3500).
Nah, I didn’t think the buyer reaching out to Mercedes was anything nefarious. I’ve contacted previous owners before when weird issues have come up. Sometimes they’ve had the issue before but it was intermittent enough that they forgot to disclose it. Things happen. And I wouldn’t think anything of it if the new owner of a car I sold reached out for help.
Also, many scanners will only read codes associated with CELs, so a glow plug light might not throw a readable code for a basic scanner.
Never hurts to ask the previous owner, in my opinion.
Yeah, I probably read too much into it and maybe it’s just that Mercedes is a more empathetic and less suspicious person than I am. I didn’t think about the glow plug light not scanning (never owned a diesel and don’t know people with them). Weird that they use that as a kind of CEL for issues that aren’t the glow plugs, but I suppose that’s VW. I could see that, then, just checking in with the seller to see if it was forgotten and there’s an easy hack to fix it rather than accusing them of non-disclosure.
Yeah, VW is weird like that. To my knowledge, a flashing glow plug light can mean a glow plug issue or something else pissing off the car that isn’t even related to glow plugs. But also, not boost, because that causes a different warning trigger.
Why do I love VW again? 🙂
No idea! I’ve known a number of VW/Audi people, have driven the cars, and I have never understood it, especially when helping them with repairs that shouldn’t have been needed with such low mileage (or at all).
First time dealing with a VW product (Audi A4): “You lost the second alternator with only 50k miles on it and they want a grand in labor? Screw that, I’ll drive over an hour down there this weekend with a bunch of tools and help you with that.” Gets to car. “It looks like this is easy, but it’s a ruse and they made this damn thing in the exact way that I can’t get the tool in with the radiator here and it wouldn’t even matter if it was a regular damn bolt like every sensible company would use.” Looks around more carefully. “Wait a minute, it looks like the whole f’n front of the car, cooling system, and all has to be removed?!”
“Yeah, man, the bumper beam is on a hinge. Book says it’s a 10 hour job or something.”
“You know what it took me when the original alternator on my Legacy started only charging intermittently at 1/4 million miles? Fifteen easy minutes and an ordinary socket and wrench. And my car has actual steering feel and much better handling balance.”
“Yeah, but this car is faster and the engine is just a tune away from [my brain substitutes meaningless power number for “reduced time frame for self destruction” and I don’t hear the rest].”
“Dude, you own three of these to keep one running at any given time.”
“What’s your point?”
I once called the seller back after buying a “project” car sight unseen and shipping it from Colorado to Chicago after it lived its first 10 years in Chicago then the next 10 in Denver. I was expecting a car in roughly the same rusty semi-working state as the one Mercedes sold. It shows up and it’s completely flawless, no rust underneath anywhere. I ended up calling the seller back to ask about this and he told me he never drove it in the winter, he always took his Jeep. I asked him if I could send him $500-$1000 more as the price I paid was fair for a car in the shape as the one Mercedes sold, but ludicrously cheap for an essentially perfect example, but he refused. It’s now been 4.5 years of me waiting for anything to break in some way so I can start tinkering on my “project” car.
That’s incredible! I once left work on a Friday and drove from north of Boston to Detroit to look at a car the next morning that was “in great shape for its age with almost no rust”. Got there and it was held together by the paint. I asked the clown if he wanted me to punch a hole in the fender to show him how bad it was when he tried to act like he wasn’t aware it was so bad, but he declined. I really wanted to punch a hole in him as the car also had a number of other undisclosed issues so that it wasn’t even good for a parts car. Anyway, I cursed him and was back home Saturday night.