Quote:
Originally Posted by undercoverbrother
That club sounds crappy to be honest.
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It's a unique situation, because it's literally the only manual transmission, naturally aspirated V8 wagon you can realistically buy. That's the club we're talking about here. There's the CTS-V I guess, but then you're spending big bucks (at least 60k, probably more like 70k now) for an old cadillac, if you can actually find one in manual.
And the car itself is fine for 200k. Longer, really. Almost everything about it is quite reliable. It's just that this particular model has a design flaw, which is that the guides for the timing chain can crack, because they're made of, essentially, plastic. If they do, they're simple enough to replace... except that they can't be accessed without taking the whole engine out of the car. Nik says that's 8k and I think he's being optimistic. I think it's 12-15, which is more than the value of a lot of S4 avants (not the ones in top condition, but a lot of them). The RS4 used metal guides (as did the V8 R8, which has almost the same engine) and thus doesn't suffer from that issue.
So, basically, if you want a manual V8 wagon, you have only one realistic option, and that option might break at some point. But until or unless it does, the risk of failure actually drives the entry price down enough that it actually makes it a club very much worth being in. And you can mitigate the risk of the chain issue by shortening the window of your oil changes to 5000 km.
Put it this way: a new 2020 A4 Allroad is about 1k/mo on a 36 month lease - so, over $30k to drive for 3 years. A very good condition B7 S4 is half of that to buy outright. I'd easily rather drive the B7, no contest, even if it
does break after 3 years, and even if it does, and it isn't worth fixing, you can still sell the parts and make something back. And hey, so far so good on mine, knock on wood.