[Savannah]

Hi All,

My neighbour has a 2009 A3 S-Line wagon with the 2.0 TFSI and this past week his engine seized with no warning.

He bought the car 2 years ago so not sure about the maintenance history. Since he bought it he put on about 20000KM so just had over 98,000 KM when the engine seized. He says he has respected the oil change intervals and using synthetic. I was surprised when he said what happened.

We have a 2016 Q3 with I presume is the same engine. I've searched the web and sure enough there are a number of reports of engine seizer but the posts all seem to date back a couple of years.

So, can anyone answer the following questions:
1. Did Audi ever find the root cause for the engine seizers?
2. If so, what was done and was it applied to our engines.

I realize that the 2.0 litre engine used by Audi/Volks is in many models many cars and percentage wise, number of engine seizers are small, but just want to know what info is out there.

Don't mean to scare anyone about this.

Bob

 

[BobInPa]

Hi Savannah/Bob,

Talk about scary.

Some of the problems mentioned in the following links have been lessened over the years but 2009 was really early on.
FYI: When you see or hear VW Tiquan just substitute Audi Q3.

www.shopdap.com/common-problems-2-0t-tsi-engine/

Bob

 

[rnlabas]

Engine seizures are not a small failure and can be quite scary when happening. While the VAG 2.0 has has some failures of this type, as you note the percentage of the delivered base is not particularly high for this, but a bit more so for turbos. Both are generally related to lubrication, with the latter more sensitively so with clean or high enough volume/pressure to the bearing surfaces.

An engine seizure is usually not "without warning" unless no one is paying attention to oil levels or operating temperature at all. Turbo failures can happen a bit suddenly when all else appears normal, but again paying attention usually gives a bit of a heads up even on the turbo.

There was a case queried on this forum of a mom driving her son's car and she experienced a "sudden" seizure failure, but I wonder what her son had been doing with the car just before turning it over to her ...

I drive my 2.0s (I have 2) pretty hard, but I also pay close attention to oil levels, operating temps, oil condition and let the engine chill for a few minutes after a hard run to prevent oil coking in the turbo, even though the design progression has tried to accommodate this over the years.