My wife's Audi in the shop for NEW PISTONS...
 

the 2011 A4 wagon has the dreaded oil consupmtion problem - 1 qt every 600miles. It failed the stage II test therefore I qualify for 'NEW PISTONS'!

oh btw - nothing wrong with my '95 E300 diesel or the '99 E300TD (well that is a white lie but it doesn't need NEW PISTONS :))

Dreaded piston rings. Those VW engines are junk.

quality

Yikes.

I rode in a 6ish year old A4 quattro the other day, 122k on it...most warning lights were on....it vibrated.....speedo was dead....interior falling apart, suspension clunking....:eek: Scary stuff. I am glad I ditched my VW 9 months in. The 10 year old MB I replaced it with has had zero problems, I had the VW to the dealer 7 times in 9 months for issues and quality problems....and that's excluding the horrendous service from the typical VW service dept....

Only car I have ever blown an engine up on was a 74 Audi 4 cylinder car.

Audi makes elegant cars. When my parents lived in England they had a Passat Turbo Diesel. It would peg you into the seat until well over 100 mph and rode like a dream. When I lived in Wolfsburg working at VW one of the VPs had his license suspended for going 140mph in a not 140mph zone on the autobahn. It was a Phaeton W12. Actually stepped on Audi's toes because it crossed the line into luxury cars which is supposed to be Audi territory.

But.... Would you really buy a new Mercedes and hope for it to go over 100k miles? I wouldn't... That's not the focus of modern automobiles.

Any halfway decently designed and built car sold new today should be able to do 200,000 if maintained. If it won't, it either isn't designed well or isn't built well.

Yup. My wife bought her 2007 a4 avant with the 2.0 engine CPO in 2010 with 27000 miles, she found out about the consumption issue shortly thereafter. New piston seals under the CPO warranty. We kept the car until last May and 72000 miles, the oil light consistently came on after 2000 miles and had to add a quart of the synthetic. The car was fun to drive and was fast. Especially to us, she coming from an '85 300d and me an '84 300d. The rear window wiper was the final straw for me. It was designed so that it clogs easily, traps fluid and fries the motor. We traded the audi in on a 2007 4runner, it goes well with our 2002 tundra, they're easy to live with.

Back in the day we did lots of early M103 pistons. Piston slap was the issue. Lots of M112 pistons due to oil consumption. More recently we've had a small number of M276 piston jobs due to knocking noises. Job security ;)

We recently had an 07 272 engine in with low compression on one hole. Turns out it had a cracked piston. It was cracked across the whole crown parallel to the piston pin. No obvious reason why.

There is no doubt that some of the older Mercedes products were built to a standard rather than a price. Having said that, we have VWs and Audis and they have been good cars. My experience is that maintenance seems to be neglected on these cars after they are out of warranty.

Most of the cars I've owned have needed oil added between changes. 2000 miles to be down a quart isn't bad. I had a Sammy once that took a quart every 200 miles.

I dont think any engine maker makes their own pistons, so there is a high likelihood that they source them form common vendors, like Kolbenschmidt or Mahle.