going back to my vw roots...

[Sijray21]

well i guess i'll give this a little update:

i'm sitting at about 5800 miles or so on the odometer and so far i love this car. It's quick enough to keep me happy, usable for moving bigger things around, plenty of leg room for full-sized passengers in the rear seats, and pretty decent gas mileage. I've been able to use the Thule Bike rack plenty of times to make it very useful. The Thule Peloton bike racks are amazingly easy to use; no more screwing the skewer a bunch of times, clamp-up and clamp down. I have noticed that through mpg trends the rack has lowered my average mpg a couple notches on the highway (30mpg instead of 32/33), and i've also made a few modifications: added aspherical euro-side mirror lenses (still heated) and bought a vag-com device to configure some electronic options:

- I changed my DRLs to my fog lights
- removed the annoying *honk* from locking the car via the key fob
- added the auto-up (including sunroof) and auto-down (not including the sunroof) for the power windows via the key fob
- enabled the staging for the guages (analog guages go full tilt and then back to normal upon start)
- enabled the fog lights to be cornering lights when the headlights are turned on (ie: lower speed turn signal to the right makes the passenger fog light turn on or if i'm driving slower and the wheel is turned to the right it engages the passenger fog light -- kinda nifty)
- fixed my TPMS error by adjusting the air pressure reading to trigger the TPMS monitor (originally set to 5.5bar ~ 88psi)

There has been one electronic issue (surprise...surprise :-P -- cue Rex); the TMPS sensor tripped although all pressures were good for all four (+spare) tires. This was triggered at 1450 miles and i lived with it until about the 4k mile mark where i took care of it myself (via vagcom). There is also the rear windshield washer drip. I've lived with it for a while and i'm bringing it in to my VW dealership later this week -- this is the same issue Mike has with his Gti.

I also changed the oil myself (VW will do this for me for free, but i chose to do this myself). Although the recommended interval for the first oil change wasn't until 10k miles, i decided to change mine at 4850 miles. It seemed like a lot coming from the standard 3k intervals with all other cars, but i read a few sources saying that the oil shouldn't be changed before 3k miles/5k km due to the break-in oil provided by VW and that 10k would be 'fine' with the new synthetic oils. I was curious about this statement so I took a sample and sent it off to blackstone labs for analysis. The filter is also super-easy to change as it sits in front of the engine and you can access it from the top of the engine bay (no more getting messy under the car). The only thing that irks me is that the crush washer for the oil drain plug is built into the drain plug bolt. You have to buy another drain plug bolt every time you change the oil -- $3 instead of $0.10.

pics of the aspherical side mirrors: