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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In high school I bought a friend’s dad’s truck for a little over $2k, for which I paid half upfront and was making payments to the seller on the rest. The truck blew a head gasket, overheated and cracked the block within 2 weeks. I immediately stopped paying and sold the truck for parts to fund my next down payment (~$500?). At this point I was in crisis mode and just trying to get to work. A refund for the truck wasn’t on the table.
Its still a sore subject to this day, though we’re good friends still. Am I the asshole? Granted, I was 16 at the time. It sucks for everyone involved.
Very nice of you, but caveat emptor. Do due diligence (always wanted to write that).
You should not feel bad in any way. I take full responsibility for every car I buy, even if some have come from sellers who were totally economical with the truth. However I know it can be hard to put our standards onto buyers. I always take a code reader with me when I buy a car, this is just good practice and at anything below $5,000 there is an element of risk, unless it is a BMW then you need to raise that to $10,000. Congratulations on thinning the herd, that is always hard to do. Good on you for giving the guy a $500 refund, he should be very happy with his purchase.
“economical with the truth.” I might need to steal that phrase.
I feel like anyone who buys an ex-Autopian car, and has read the site, should have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into.
Exactly! I’d feel cheated if the car didn’t break down!
Am I sensing the highest tier of membership above RCL? For $1450 you can buy a writer’s car and really live the life of an Autopian writer!
You can live in it! In fact it may be better as lodging than as transportation.
I would think if he had any familiarity with VWs that he’d fully expect it. Ultimately, having to restart every 30 minutes to get it home is a lot better than it could have been. The few times I sold a car to an individual, I told them every tiny thing I could think of that was wrong as I don’t want to be that person and I also don’t need the bad karma to net myself another $500, but once they leave, it’s all theirs good, bad, or ugly. The last two I sold went to people several hours away. The Focus ST was sold as the engine had the Ecoboom head/block coolant passage problem where it smoked pretty badly (especially on start up), though the actual coolant loss was surprisingly minimal and I told him before he came that, while I had driven it for an hour at a time and it was fine, I couldn’t guarantee a 3 hour drive back and that he might have wanted to trailer it. He was a younger guy who came with a friend to follow him and I assume he made it as I never heard from him. Admittedly, at that age, I would have done the same.
He was buying a 20 year old VW product, from the exact time where they were engineered to fail as soon as the warranty period expired (after already failing half a dozen times during the warranty period). Even if it was a peach of an example, he knew the risks.
Very kind of you to send him that money back, but It’s all part of the game, friendo.
Every car I sell, I sell with confidence that it’s a good vehicle, and between being initially driven by a manager, our service department checking it, and the customer test driving the vehicle, the likelihood of an issue popping up is very low.
But still, you can’t see the future. It happens, and while a dealership can absorb the costs of making something right for a customer (and we pretty much ALWAYS do) a private owner can’t do this.
It’s kind of an unwritten rule that when you buy from a private owner, this is the risk that you take. You’re buying a car as-is, where-is, how-is, and while I don’t expect everyone to know the reputation of a 2 decade old VW, like, come on. It’s a 2 decade old $2000 dollar car. You are GOING to have problems, if you dont want to deal with that possibility, you need to be looking at a 3 decade old Toyota Corrolla.
Given how much was already known to be broken on this car, it’s entirely possible that whatever failed hadn’t failed when you sold it and it just chose that moment to die. If you disclosed everything you knew about the car, which it sounds like you did, and something you didn’t (and maybe couldn’t) know about failed, your conscience should be clear.
That said, I totally get feeling bad about stuff that’s not your fault. As much as it sucks, I feel like the silver lining is that it means you have empathy, which is in increasingly short supply these days.
Kinda makes one wish the original Allman Brothers band members weren’t all dead now so they could record a new album called “Eat A Piëch.”
COTd contender given Dickey just died.
So now you’re on the hunt for one of those Vixen motorhones with the BMW diesel engines, right? You could get your motorhome, diesel, BMW, and probably hopelessly ruined cravings all in one vehicle!
If it didn’t, is it really a VW? 😛
You didn’t scam anybody. You sold a shitty VW and disclosed everything you knew about it. The shitty VW then did what shitty VWs do, it broke down. The fact that you feel bad, is because you’re a good person. The fact that you gave him slightly more than 25% of his money back, makes you a better seller than just about everybody out there. Including me!
I sold a jellybean F-150 with 200k miles on it to a dude a few years ago, and disclosed everything I knew about it, for $800. He gave it to his 16-year old who went out with his buddies doing donuts and burnouts a few days later, and blew it up. I did not give him any money back. I did not scam him. I sold him a truck with plenty of life left in it, so long as it was properly cared for. It was not not properly cared for, and so it died. That was not my fault, so the money stayed in my pocket.
I mean I know what you’re saying but it’s one of those things. I sold my ’06 Elantra GT hatchback, very much loved over a decade, to someone for $2k. It was in great mechanical shape at 120k and didn’t really have any issues other than a front passenger seat that needed new leather.
I warned them that the one issue was that you really had to pull on the parking brake hard to get it to stick and it was 5MT that had been adjusted a couple times over the last few years. Lo and behold, within the first week, I got a call from the buyer. The car rolled down the hill and totaled itself.
I told them I was sincerely sorry and felt horrible, but mentioned that that was in correspondence in writing we had. I haven’t lost any sleep over that. And you shouldn’t lose sleep over this.
Take your wife’s advice to heart. It’s an unfortunate circumstance but you honestly didn’t know and it’s not unreasonable someone that is a (near) city dweller might not have taken a long drive recently. Giving some money back was definitely above and beyond so feel good about that.
Heck, I haven’t taken most of my cars on more than hour trip in a few years. Granted, none are VW diesels (lol).
If you make a hobby of buying and selling the some of the most famously cantankerous cars with a mishmash of parts and 20+ years of wear for 4-figure prices. You’re gonna be on one end of this situation at least half of the time.
The buyer would have to have been crazy to not expect something like this. The partial refund and all of the guilt are not necessary.
Caveat Emptor.
You disclosed as much as you possibly could up front – and you went above and beyond afterward.
Don’t worry about it.
Exactly. IMHO, anyone buying a car that cheap and immediately road tripping it 7 hours knows they are in for a Roadkill style adventure.
Almost every beater car I’ve been involved in buying/selling has either been in the same town or towed home just to avoid what this drama. The one time we did road trip, I brought a chase vehicle filled with tools, fluids and random odds for improvised fixes. Which we needed… twice…
The way you feel is valid, and I am not telling you that you “should” feel differently, but in my mind you can’t “unintentionally scam” someone. A “scam” is a purposeful act of deceit, and it’s clear you didn’t do that.
Just my $.02
Well put. This was unfortunate, but it is by definition impossible to scam somebody by accident.
This is why I hate private party sales. Maybe I’m too nice but I always feel bad if they have an issue after they buy it. Last car I sold I fixed the wiper transmission linkage bushing for the new owner 2 weeks after I sold it. I mean I had a bushing and it only took like 20 minutes. But I still just hate the feeling that I’m going to get a text and feel guilty and make it my problem.
On the other side I could trade a car in and literally watch it go up in flames as I left the dealership, and I wouldn’t feel bad at all.
A much younger me once made the mistake of travelling to buy an iffy used car before, planning to drive it back, and didn’t even make it 30 minutes. Of course it was a VW diesel lol.
IMO, you did way more than you needed to for this guy. When in doubt, bring a trailer.
I once sold a CRX with B16 swap in it and had a similar scenario play out. I had been daily driving the car for 8 months or so. Still driving it a couple times a week up to the day I sold it. The guy showed up from a few hours away and got dropped off. His ride let him out and drove off. This was pre-Uber days, so I’m not sure what was going on there.
Top speed was about 65 because it would pop out of 5th gear, so you could only use 4th. Going faster than 65 was possible, but the engine was SCREAMING at that point. I specifically told the guy that before he came, and reminded him of that before he left.
A few hours later he called me. The car had died, wouldn’t start, wouldn’t crank. I offered to help him pay for a tow truck if he could figure out where he was (his description of location up this point was “There’s a Dan’s”). He said ok, then never called me back.
A while later I got a renewal for the registration from the State. I hadn’t told them I had sold the vehicle, and I guess that guy never registered it. I don’t know what happened to that vehicle.
I drove that thing for months easy 50 miles per day, no REAL issues (lots of little ones, but nothing serious). The only reason I can think of that it blew is he ignored me, and because he had a long drive home, he was running the engine at full tilt in 4th. I don’t know that, but after how reliable the engine was for me, its hard to imagine it blowing up randomly that way.
This makes me think of when I bought an SVT Focus off the internet from a dealer. The car was such a basket case the dealer offered to drive the car to me.
I drive it to the closest Jack in the Box to sign the paperwork and shift into 6th gear. The guy that just spent 8 hours driving the car goes, “oh, I thought it was a 5 speed.”
You even followed my two unbreakable rules for selling a used car; “..never to a friend or work colleague and never to someone who lives in my same town”
I owned a from-new B5 Passat GLX 4-Motion wagon. Great when it was good but what a crap-bath of bad. Electrical, HVAC, ECU program, and on and on and on….
This. Never sell a car to a friend.
“…never to a friend.”
My wife perhaps broke that rule twice over by “selling” her Prius to a friend. That’s in quotes because the car still had payments left and the friend was going to make those payments. One chunky Wisconsin deer took out the Prius, leaving a payment but no car…
I’m glad I wasn’t into VAG stuff in the Piech times. Things sure have come a long way.
Friends don’t let friends Piech-era VW.
The guy should have been an Autopian member!
He would of never bought it LOL
There are three Passats in this picture.
At first I thought you might meant the brick house was the third, but it’s now clear you meant the dumpster.
I’m happy someone noticed that so quickly. 🙂
Gul Mercedes: How many Passats do you see?
Picard: There are two Passats.
Gul Mercedes: No, there are three Passats. How many Passats do you see?