Kees

Sold for $6.5K. If there isn’t too much wrong with it I think that’s a decent deal someone got with enough room in the budget left over to give it a decent tidy up.

Popped the sickest awd skid g, Passat W8 is da ultimate skid hack

Just got the typical "pop a skid" while driving through Milford main street in the 4-Motion W8, what a simple minded plebeian. At least he said my car sounds nice.

Love optional extra ciggies on the floor, and the light weight "missing interior trim" option. Also appreciate the BMW "Individual" ruined front bumper, and very classy munted seat bolster too. Poor car. Saw it come up on Facebook a while ago. It's not even a factory manual. Realistically I wonder what its worth? 20-25K? Most thrashed example I've seen in a long time.

Great news you got it back! Aside from a deep clean I reckon you should potentially have the car meth tested. Testing kits are available or you can have lab testing done which will give you a specific figure on the level of contamination. A lot of higher end stolen vehicles are used by drug users and drug makers/distributors so there is probably a high likelihood of meth being smoked in the car. Legal limit is 1.5 micrograms per 100cm squared. One of my old cars I got from an insurance auction as a stolen/recovered vehicle. While the car was mechanically fine I had to have it meth tested as part of getting it back on the road. From memory, 5 places were swabbed, with 2 places coming back slightly above the limit. The testing agency said this was consistent with people smoking meth in the car. While it was only a small amount over the legal limit I still had to have my car professionally decontaminated.

I've had that M Roadster on my watchlist for a while now and I'm honestly surprised no one has snapped it up yet. If the car was local to me I would be down in a flash to check it out. Quite a few people just have no idea what it even is. Seems very fairly priced considering how rare the M Roadster is. The only thing off putting for me are the wheels which do not suit the car at all imo. I reckon if you got some factory Style 40 wheels and sourced a silver hard top roof you will have a very sought after little machine. Another dealer is trying to sell a silver M Roadster for $80K, while I think this is a little absurd in the current market, I can only see these shooting up in value, especially as the coupes climb in value.

At the point where you can properly afford a 2.8 swap or a decent supercharger setup, I would personally just buy another BMW with a factory 2.5 or a 2.8 as a fun/project car, and keep the 320i as a reliable daily. Easier and cheaper to start with a more suited car from the start, otherwise things will get expensive quickly. Your wallet will thank you if the 320i stays a stock daily with the way fuel prices are going anyway. @KwS summarised it well with the pick two analogy, there will always be compromise, and if the 320i is your only car, one of the choices must be for it to be reliable and useable.

Just had a read of the comments, sounds like he has a nice bit of kit. Liquid yellow (my favourite for Meganes), the Recaros too and its a 265. Would be quite the weapon. However I think I'll be sticking with the 207 as the primary daily for now, have a few things coming up that require me to be boring and responsible with money over the next few months unfortunately.

Not quite a 991, only a 997.2 Carrera S. Is a 6 speed manual and the last generation with hydraulic steering though and it is also unfortunately not mine It's my mother's former daily driver, now a weekend toy as she daily drives a Smart Fortwo! The neighbour's roll their eyes with the plethora of unique and strange vehicles that frequent the house 🤣

Yeah very true, for over 4 years and 50,000km she's done alright, especially since it does get frequent workouts on back roads. Most other 207 GTIs I've seen so far (which is only a handful because they are quite rare) have all been quite a bit more worse for wear than my one. Have been meaning to give it a tidy up as with a wheel refurbishment and a couple small carpark dents removed it would be close to mint as far as daily drivers go. Is a car I've told myself I will try keep forever, although I've been increasingly tempted by RS Meganes of late. Maybe I just need to have two Frenchies in the fleet? R53 Cooper S is a good shout, will keep my eye out for one as for the right price I can see myself scooping one up for a bit of fun and maybe a budget GP inspired build?! Haha your adding to the temptation of buying another sight unseen machine from down there 🤣 (thats where I got my manual W8 from)

Interesting, I've had my 207 GTI since the start of 2018 with 65,000km and so far its had; cracked turbo intake pipe, leaking oil cooler, faulty turbo solenoid (forced the car into limp mode as it was only making about 40% boost), faulty thermostat (was stuck open), faulty fan resistor and one time after work it decided to become a 3-cylinder when one of the coils refused to work. Of course I waited 5 hours for a tow in the cold and got home at about 3AM. Car was fine the next day naturally. Replaced all the plugs and coils as a precaution, and have two spare coils in the boot, along with oil. BUT, As you said, cars are a drug and I still like the thing despite it being a frequent headache. Open the door and you are greeted by some big leather and alcantara bucket seats, its got old school pop out rear windows, its a nippy 5 speed manual, and its very stiffly sprung so it handles really nice on a backroad. JCW would be on another level of amazing though! Especially with that super charger whine!

I can only dream! I actually looked at a rough high ks one in 2019 I think it was, and stupidly decided against buying it. Had been used for track days so was a bit rough around the edges and I think it had 190,000km or more, but this was reflected in its price. Only having 2 seats and its overall condition made me decide to keep my 207 GTI which I still have (it has the famously unreliable co-BMW developed 1.6THP engine found in R56 Cooper S and R56 JCW cars). I knew they would shoot up in value, such awesome cars. I guess I have "not-the-buyer" remorse! Ugh should have bought one.

@E28E30 What a slick looking machine! Best of luck with the sale!

Was flicking through a classic car magazine from January 2019, and I decided to have a look at the for sale section to sulk about classic car prices from 3 years ago. After seeing a 993 911 for 32K, I turn the page and see a familiar looking red e30. @E28E30 Spotted!

Is the duplicate plates option on the LicenSys website a remake of my current plate combination? Definitely don't want to lose the original combination! I'm very OCD about NZ New cars having original plates. Was one of the things that attracted me to my 540i and my W8 in the first place, as well as my daily driver 207 GTI.

Good point, I probably should order a new set. Do you have to send them your old ones back?

The neighbours all rolled their eyes when the second one turned up 🤣 Ended up having a chat to the guy who lives opposite me. Turns out he owned a manual W8 back in the day. Crazy coincidence since I think there were only ever about 10 in NZ, with roughly 4 left now!

I believe it is in-fact in km. Here is what has happened I reckon: If we look at the carjam, it is recorded in miles. However, the car has an un-natural jump of 70,000 miles (over 110,000km) from 2019 to 2021. Clearly this is a mistake. In 2019 it was at 115,601 miles or 186,041km. It then had its next WOF 18 months later in July 2021, indicating the car probably was not used, hence the WOF lapsed. In July 2021, it was recorded to have done 186,932 miles, but as we saw the screen is in kilometers, so was most likely switched to km prior to the WOF and then wrongly recorded. 186,932km is 116,154 miles which matches the timeline. July 2021: 116,154 miles October 2019: 115,601 miles Therefore I think it is most likely at 187,000km, the WOF inspector just didn't do the conversion after the screen metric was changed. Good looking car too, and decently priced especially with the detachable hardtop being included. Good on the dealer for being cautious though!

Thanks! Haha yeah, we should burn all trees!!

Thought I would do an update on how the manual W8 Passat is going so far. In the month and a half I have had it, I've already done over 2500km! Since I am yet to find an undercover spot for it, I've been parking it at my house which has been bad for my wallet as I've been taking it out every other night for a cruise from the shore to Auckland CBD and back. It's really surprised me on how nice it is to drive. So far, not a ton of issues, but not trouble free either. My intermittent check engine light has become a permanent one and its fuel intake issue seems to be getting worse. W8 Passats have a highly sophisticated (over complicated) fuel tank setup. Volkswagen, in their wisdom, decided that because the Passat was getting a 4.0L W8 engine, it should have a bigger fuel tank capacity. Instead of making the fuel tank bigger, they decided it would be better to add a second 20L tank in the spare tyre well to compliment the standard 60L tank, and then have an internal fuel pump to pump fuel from the 20L tank to the 60L tank when required. This means the car has no less than 4 fuel level senders! The fuel tank also has its own control module which figures out combined fuel level of the two tanks which is then shown on the fuel gauge. The fuel gauge in my car does not work, most likely as a result of the fuel tank control module being faulty, or one or more of the fuel level senders not working. However, this wouldn't bother me if I could at least fill the car up. If I could fill it up I would just go 400-500km and then refuel. When I first got the car, if you didn't hold the pump at an angle, the pump would click off every litre. But if you had it at the right angle, fuel would go in just fine. However, over the last few weeks, unless you have the pump at an absolute dribble, the pump will click off every 30 cents or so, which means putting as little as $20 worth in takes about 5 minutes. Very, very annoying. It means I don't know how full my tank is because I can't just fill it up as the pump clicks off every second so I have no idea where the "top" is, and of course, my fuel gauge doesn't work! I stuck a borescope camera down the filler neck and it showed fuel seems to be sitting at the first bend which is in line with the top of the 60L tank. This would show that the car appears to be overfilled with fuel, yet I'll drive 200+km, and then still have trouble getting fuel into the car. Doing some reading online, I hypothesise the charcoal canister in my car is damaged. The charcoal canister breathes the fuel tank. What I think has happened is when the fuel gauge broke, one of the previous owners thought it would be a clever idea to fill the tank right to the top of the filler neck to hold as much fuel as possible. However, what this does is allow fuel to get into the breather line and turn the charcoal canister into a concrete-like substance, which means it won't be doing any breathing. In a normal Passat the charcoal canister is easy to get to, but of course, in a W8 it is sandwiched by the additional 20L tank, meaning you have to drop the whole fuel tank just to get to it! Currently I just go to the petrol station at night so I don't annoy too many people by being slow, put some music on and stand there for 15 minutes to put a bit of fuel in, and then work out how far I can go. My current plan to sort this is to try find the charcoal canister line so that I can vent the tank to atmosphere, and bypass VWs complicated system of sending the gases to the engine. Anyway, on to things that have been done, so far: A few days after my last post about the car I had it serviced. The oil looked alright but the previous owner couldn't remember when he had last changed it, and what oil he had put in it. The coolant looked pretty grotty so I was keen to have that flushed out. I took the car to Weissach Motors on the North Shore who are Porsche and VAG specialists, after my parents recommended it to me as they had done rear shock replacements on my mother's 911. The car got some Liqui Moly 5W-40 and had the cooling system flushed. Apparently, the reason the coolant looked grotty is Volkswagen used a material in the cooling system that does not like regular tap water, which over time makes coolant look bad as it degrades. Weissach Motors have a very slick email system which sent me a detailed inspection they had carried out on my car while it was there for service including photos of issues. A few things came up which I wanted to sort. Front CV boots were both split, with one leaking grease. Brake hoses had some cracking and there were some perished bushings in the front end. Hopefully next week the car will go in to have all this stuff sorted. I also had a nail in my front left tyre, so tyres jumped closer to the top of my "to-do" list, especially since the rears had un-even wear and pretty low tread anyway. The battery was also terrible so I replaced that with a Century one. One thing that I felt let down my Passat were the wheels. The factory BBS wheels are a cool looking wheel, but mine were in very, very bad shape. I took them to Wheel-Fix It, and since the centres were oxidising and all the lips were very curbed, to have them properly sorted they would need to be chemically stripped, which would cost close to $3K. They were so bad in fact, the guy said it would be best to find a new set and refurbish them instead. Considering I also needed new tyres, I started looking at a more affordable way to sort the wheels. I began searching for another set of W8 wheels, however seeing as W8s are quite rare, and to my knowledge the BBS wheels on W8s didn't go on any other Volkswagen, I couldn't find anything. I then thought about buying another W8 just for the wheels. I looked on Facebook Marketplace, hoping to find a very cheap W8 with somewhat decent wheels, however I couldn't find anything. I then had a look on trademe, and to my surprise I found a silver, NZ New auto W8 Passat, also with the rare Recaro interior, and with much tidier wheels wrapped in Bridgestone RE003s for sale at a dealer in Hamilton. It had been for sale for over 5 months so I drove to Hamilton with a mate and offered the dealer a fair amount (only about $1200 under asking price). I now had two silver NZ new W8s. We drove the cars home in tandem which must have confused other motorists seeing two; largely identical W8 Passats driving together. We swapped the wheels that night, and I was pretty happy with how it improved the look of the car. Driving both cars also made me realise how special the manual one is. They feel very different to each other. The auto is a nice cruiser but is way too laid back especially around town and very boring compared with the manual. The auto one went back on trademe that evening. Now that I had two W8s, I set about sorting a few things on my manual car, using bits from the auto one. My manual one was missing its boot gas struts, and had a faulty boot lock actuator, meaning you could only open the boot by putting the key in the lock. I swapped the gas struts and then the actuator. Of course the screws holding the actuator in place are located face up to the boot skin so you have to take the entire bracket holding the lock and plate lights off, and then squeeze the screw bit and a small ratchet in to get the actuator off. Got there in the end, and now I have a boot that opens by holding the button on the key. The button inside the car and the handle seem to intermittently work now when they feel like it. That night I took the car out to get some petrol as I was so pleased with how it was going, and was proud of how tidy the car was starting to look. Of course 3 minutes out from my house a tree branch fell down onto the car, leaving a nice dent in the bonnet which I will have to have pulled out. The bonnet is double skinned so will be a bit of a pain to sort as you can't get it from the inside. Was pretty pissed off. To cheer myself up a bit, I had my headlights polished and coated at Renew Car as they were yellowing and were faded in some areas. Car looks a bit fresher with polished headlights now. I also continued cleaning the interior. Did a wet-vac of the carpets which has helped remove the cigarette smell from the car, and I sorted out the peeling wood veneer trim with some 3M Outdoor Mounting Tape. So that just about covers what I have done to the W8 so far. Took it out for a few photos over the past couple days:

Agreed! Will most likely get some snazzy euro plates at some point in the future as my other car is sucking all my money at the moment.

Yesterday I was looking over my E34 which I hadn't driven in a couple weeks, and spotted some masking tape and half a can of gloss black plasti-dip. I decided I should mask off the front license plate filler, which was pretty battered from 370,000km of NZ's finest roads, to see if I could make it look any better. Didn't bother to do any prep work other than give the area a quick wipe with a rag and then began spraying. Took all the masking off this afternoon and it actually looks decent enough, and will be a good temporary fix until I can be bothered to order a new one.

Spotted this today and had to laugh. Not sure what you are going to tow with your Cayman!

I did a couple coats on my 540 in October and the paint is still glossy and hydrophobic. One thing I've heard recently is to keep the coating on for as long as possible you should use a pH neutral car wash. I think Autoglym and Meguairs have pH neutral options. I had been using a generic Turtle Wax car wash but I will be switching to something pH neutral. Just reminded me I did a polish and ceramic coating on my old S8 when I had it with the Turtle Wax Ceramic Black products. Photos are a bit rubbish but man the Turtle Wax stuff does a slick job.

Yup, living dangerously! 🤣