Everything wrong with my Budget TDI

Key Takeaways

it's a jetta oh and it's a tdi in one of my last videos i gave this vehicle quite a lot of praise i said things like this vehicle gets great gas mileage even when it's modified to make more power which is true i posted a lot of sound clips because i think this car does sound pretty cool when it's straight piped and i also said things like these cars are very cheap because they are very cheap but today we're going to get into some of the issues with this vehicle that i have personally and you know some of the issues with these cars in general because they're not without their faults now before i go any farther on this vehicle i want to talk about the owners of these vehicles the people that i see you know being enthusiastic about these vehicles not just people daily driving them or whatever doing small minor little things to the vehicles you know mine mine would be considered daily driver status right now i haven't really done much but fix it up so far i've noticed some things about the owners of tdis uh in my research before buying one and you know looking around the internet now i understand that this is not inclusive to all of you tdi owners out there so please know and get mad at me i'm just making some general statements here on things i've noticed some of you tdi owners believe these vehicles are are off-road machines similar to jeeps i don't really even like jeeps that much to begin with but i'll give them a pass on this one they do have four-wheel drive for example and you know jeeps are originally off-road vehicles i'll say the volkswagen jetta was never meant to be an off-road vehicle for some reason i only see this in mark 4 jettas as well or mark for golfs but for some reason the turbo diesel variant of the mark iv golfs and jettas they get turned into or at least attempted to be converted into complete off-road vehicles why is this why do you guys do this i don't i just don't understand it first of all let's talk about the drivetrain here these are front-wheel drive vehicles everyone knows this i know there might be some like four-motion all-wheel drive jetta wagons in other countries and such but here in america if you buy a jetta or a golf mark iv tdi it is going to be front-wheel drive if you convert this to all-wheel drive have at it turn it into an off-road vehicle if you so happen to want to that's you know you've earned it at that point but yeah we've got an open diff front-wheel drive vehicle and never mind taking this thing off-road i've tried to drive this thing in the snow and it is garbage in the snow much much worse than my own gti here which is like a sporty vehicle from volkswagen this thing does have like winter tires but look how low it is this thing is way better in the snow than this jetta so i find it hard to believe that anyone is really taking these genuinely off-roading and you know i'm not saying you shouldn't do whatever you want to your vehicle but i just don't i just don't understand the point of it because there's no real functionality maybe i'm wrong maybe there's there's someone in the comments that can correct me on this anyways on the things that i hate about this jetta this is a jetta tdi marked fourth of 2001 with 280 000 miles we got the wiener schnitzel transmission in there but i actually kind of hate this vehicle sometimes it's got so many problems that i've already tried to fix the previous owner gave me this vehicle you know trying to make it seem like it wasn't really that bad it just needed a few things to fix up but it needed a little bit more maybe than he stated so i'm trying to show you guys under the hood right now to pop the hood you have to pull this latch which is fine that's normal that's normal right but i come over here you know where do i pop this up oh i pulled this up and now this little pull tab comes out this thing's made of plastic flimsy as anything i got to pull this up and pull up on the hood at the same time like why not have a latch just like a normal vehicle and the engine was a lot worse first of all it idled like crap anyways the egr was completely clogged which i mentioned in my last video so i replaced that with just a big piece of pipe the fact that the egr was completely clogged i immediately knew that no one had ever cared for this vehicle at all or service detention in any way shape or form which is not necessarily you know a great sign we had three leaks here on the pump we had a leak right up here which is a pretty easy one to replace then that ain't bad at all we had another leak down here which someone tried to repair with silicon gasket maker goop which was just appalling and sad because the gasket kit for this pump was only twenty dollars then finally between the head here this is the head of the pump and this is the actual pump we had an actual o-ring failure so it was leaking all down here this was by far the worst to replace normally how you replace that seal is you take the whole pump off and rebuild it there is one way you can do it though which is what we did basically you take these lines off and everything you take this off right up here you leave one of these bolts in put duct tape around the whole pump head you grease up the gasket then you stretch it over the pump head and back into place over here in between this where it goes but i mean it worked it no longer leaks now but that was super sketchy and made me pretty mad because that's that's a pretty annoying leak to repair on this motor he said oh like 40 000 miles ago this thing had a timing belt service i was like oh that's pretty great that means i don't really have to worry about it upon inspection here timing belt doesn't really look too bad doesn't look like it's in bad shape or anything but if you look over here at 250 000 miles that's when the timing belt was last uh replaced what was the what was the year is that oh my is that 2015 i don't know about you guys but it's it's uh 2022 right now for me uh so that was quite some time ago that that's an old timing belt this thing really has not been driven a lot in the past like seven years which is just absolutely crazy because it's like an almost complete project really so yeah some of you might say i got scammed but the motor is running fine now we we fixed it moving on to the looks of this vehicle first of all we have the flintstone fenders these weren't the fenders that came on this vehicle but again i had a whole project like parts car that came with this car that had uh non-rusted fenders these are brand new fenders do these look brand new to you no not really they look like they're from a triceratops um yeah they did have a little bit of rust but it wasn't really that bad so they're technically usable that's why they're on the vehicle but i have to repaint these i don't know what the previous owner did to make this happen like they tried to paint them themselves and they completely ruined it normally there's a lot of rust this vehicle honestly is pretty low on rust this was all rusted out a little bit you know with some surface rust but i sanded it down and i put some touch-up paint over it so i fixed that rust but the undercarriage is actually pretty good like i've said before uh other than that you know we've got a lot of faded paint up here which you know stinks i'm i'm kind of a stickler when it comes to paint but you know i can deal with it for how unrusted the vehicle is underneath and you know we had a little bit of rust which i also put a bunch of touch-up paint on i sanded it all down and put some touch-up paint there now right under here we've got a flintstone wheel as you can see my wheel is made out of stone pretty cool stuff as you can see the rear brakes had to be replaced because they were completely shot when i bought the vehicle like completely shot to the point where the e-brake didn't even work this thing doesn't even have an inspection sticker by the way in the interior here if we lift up our floor mats what is that but a few holes in the floor of the vehicle and floor mats that aren't even for this year jetta i don't know what jetta year floor mats these are ah it had an awful push to start i put this in it right now i'm gonna put this whole plastic piece in here and cut a hole for this push to start later but yeah it was pretty atrocious this is a lot better cruise control does not work because this is a manual swap got the oem radio somehow got the tape deck player which is just absolutely ancient ac works shockingly right the headliner here it was all like musty and disgusting i've cleaned it up but it's all stained seat belts are atrocious and getting replaced so they don't give me some kind of disease the plastics are just so disgusting i don't understand how a vehicle gets like this this is all cleaned up too by the way like i cleaned it and it still looks like this i don't want to go through the effort of replacing it right now driving this car is a little strange with the shifter and stuff i i think it's probably normal though even though it is a manual swap i think it's just the fact of the diesel that in first gear it's really only meant for getting started because you can't creep around a parking lot in first gear it doesn't want to do it going on and off the gas it's like it's just because it's a diesel it's got like instant throttle response which might kind of be a good thing right but not for cruising around a parking lot especially in a manual trans maybe i'm just not clean enough with the manual yet throw on the clutch is kind of annoying you know it grabs right at the end just like most vehicles do but but for me being a short person to push it in all the way my seat's got to be up pretty far and it's enough to the point where this foot moving to the break is like annoying also my broken glove box over here is literally out of chernobyl but yeah you know maybe maybe i overpaid for this thing a little bit it did come with an entire parts car though to fix all the issues that it has which is true so you know i can't complain too much it's it's it's definitely working it's not like it's completely broken or anything and i'm finishing someone else's project it seems thank you everyone for watching this video and listening to me complain about uh jetta things tdi things this car is it is what it is hope you enjoyed this video check out some of my other videos check out my video on um the most reliable volkswagen which is these motors and cars which is where i talk about good things about this car so if you want to hear good things about the tdi go watch that but this was a this was a complaining video i don't hate this car entirely or anything like that but you know i just wanted to talk about a few complaints that i've had with it