Volkswagen

The address of this page was a stock listing on a used-car dealer site that no longer exists. The stock is gone; what follows is a reference to the marque itself — what you will meet on the UK used market, and what is worth checking. Nothing here is offered for sale.

Volkswagen’s badging follows the group convention: TDI is a turbodiesel, TSI a turbocharged direct-injection petrol, DSG the dual-clutch automatic, BlueMotion Technology an efficiency package, GTI and R the performance derivatives.

The EA189 emissions recall

This is the single most important thing to understand about used Volkswagen Group diesels. Engines in the EA189 family — 1.6 and 2.0-litre Euro 5 TDI units built up to 2015, plus some 1.2 TDI applications — carried software that altered emissions behaviour under test. The recall that followed covered millions of cars across Volkswagen, Audi, SEAT and Skoda, and in the UK it ran to several hundred thousand vehicles.

Two practical consequences. First, the affected engines are Euro 5, so a Euro 6 diesel of a later generation sits outside the action — but confirm that against the registration rather than inferring it from the badge. Second, whether the fix was applied to a specific car is a matter of record: the DVSA recall service answers against a registration.

Petrol engines

A TSI petrol is outside the EA189 story entirely. The checks are the ordinary ones for a turbocharged direct-injection engine: cooling system condition, oil-change discipline, and the behaviour of the dual-clutch gearbox if fitted — driven in traffic rather than only on an open road, since repeated pull-aways are where a tired clutch pack shows itself.

The Polo fault record

Reviewers of the Polo report gearbox, clutch and driveshaft faults, axle and suspension problems, and electrical glitches, with the 1.4 petrol’s engine control unit singled out as difficult and expensive to fix. On more recent cars the complaints move to air conditioning, the stop-start system and the infotainment screen.