She Currently Has 105 ?
My 2007 VW Polo 2.0L Highline has just turned eight and it seems like she is going to start giving me problems. Just yesterday, on my way back from Paarl, after driving a total round trip distance of approximately 300 Km, I was jolted to attention by the pong-pong sound of the dashboard alarm/buzzer. Looking at my VW Polo's instrument panel, saw the red thermometer symbol flashing on the cluster display and the heat gauge was hovering around 100 degrees. The needle was lying just beneath the first red line in the gauge and I felt my heart throbbing in my throat. I immediately thought the worst, that my cylinder head gasket may have popped, but lucky for me I was just a few hundred meters away from home and not on a deserted on an open road somewhere in the outback. Never in all the time I owned my VW Polo 2.0L Highline has anything like this ever happened.
She currently has 105 ? Km on her clock and is due to go for a major service soon, especially for the cam belt replacement. Considering I'm only averaging about 13 000 Km per annum, she has been put to very little use. Anyway, because the instrument panel display symbol was flashing red, I kinda thought it was the oil light. I muttered to myself, that it can't be that the oil is low, because I checked it before the trip and even topped it up. Then I realized that the oil symbol is an oil-can, but that water is symbolized by a thermometer. However I drove my VW Polo 2.0L Highline into my driveway, switched off the engine and when I popped the bonnet I could hear hissing caused by the steam that was escaping. Yet, I couldn't see where it was steaming from, though I saw a steady stream of green coolant running past my shoes.
I instinctively pulled out the dipstick and saw that the oil level was normal and even more importantly that the oil was translucent and didn't look like dirty yoghurt, like when water gets into the oil. Suddenly this all looked very familiar to me. I've had a similar problem with my 1999 Renault Megan Scenic a few years back. The leaking metal coolant pipe in question had two rubber O-rings in tandem around it, on the section that gets inserted into the round hole in the engine block. The rubber O-rings are the only two thing that prevents water from escaping. At the time I thought is was quite lame of Renault to design such a flimsy setup, instead of pressing a pipe stem into the engine block, to which a rubber hose could be clamped. Anyway, be that as it may, Volkswagen used the very same exact old concept used by Renault on their 1999 vehicle on a 2007 VW Polo, but with only one rubber O-ring.
I think it really sucks when some design feature that is commonly known to be troublesome is perpetuated in later models as impetus to a cash cow business model. VW must be selling millions of these metal coolant pipes per annum which is horrendously expensive considering that its just a cheap piece of mild steel pipe. No rocket scientist was needed to design it, bend it, or spray it black. In fact a copper pipe equal in length costs less than one third of its price. Be that as it may. The problem I had with my metal coolant pipe installation was that after I removed it, I discovered that it wasn't the correct part. 1.6 L Diesel, 06B121065L is used in VW Passat, 06H121065 D are used in the Audi Q5 2.0 TFSI, Audi A4, B8, A5 and 8T. 06C121085F is used in the Audi A6 and A4 V6 3.0L Convertible. By looking at the picture of the two metal coolant pipes below, the difference between them are clearly visible even though they look alike.
