I’d advise you to sit down and buckle in for this rant; it’s going to take a while. So I took my car, a 1993 VW Passat GLX, in Monday, February 28th, three days into my 2 week long spring break, to a VW dealership to have my exploded heater core (it’s a heat exchanger, hot coolant from the engine runs through it and provides heat to the cabin) diagnosed by a VW tech as exploded, so that VW of America (VWoA) would agree to pick up the tab to replace it as a gesture of good will. Why good will? Why are they paying to fix a part on a 12 year old car? And what’s the big deal about replacing the heater core?
A bit of back story, heater cores in older Passats (90-97) tends to have a destructive failure, resulting in the passenger cabin filling with vaporized coolant, fogging up all of the windows, as well as scalding hot liquid coolant generally pooling in the front passenger side foot well. As the Passats age, this failure is becoming more and more common. When they first started to fail in numbers a few years ago, it was like pulling teeth to get VW to replace the part, some times people had success, some times they did not, it was taking a shot in the dark, some times the dealerships blamed VWoA, some times VWoA blamed the dealerships, sometimes the dealerships would simply to refuse even opening a case with VWoA. But as the problem has become more prevalent, VWoA has become more receptive to picking up the tab, which involves the $50 heater core and somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 hours of labor, making this a very pricey fix otherwise. Many people have also come forward to say that the same part used in the Passat, which has no recall on it, is the same part used in a number of other VW chassis, notably the MKII Jetta, where there is an active recall on the part.
So what does this mean? It means I sent one email describing my encounter with my exploding heater core, I was driving back on the highway from picking up my brand new Optima 34R Red Top battery when it exploded, and I got a call from VWoA customer advocates saying once diagnosed, if it was indeed the heater core, they would be more than happy to pick up the tab. Read, VWoA has realized that if they do it this way, they don’t have to issue a recall, nor do they face a class action lawsuit from people who have had their heater cores explode putting them in a hazardous position, myself included. Seeing as I was traveling around 55mph at 7:00 pm-ish approaching a highway interchange when this happened, it was pretty hazardous. Luckily I had a rag in the car (a window cloth micro fiber towel) and a friend ridding shotgun who proceeded to stick his head out the window so as to guide me when I could finally turn off the highway onto a service road and finally into a McDonalds parking lot. Which is where we bypassed the heater core in the 20F weather with help of a 2nd friend who drove out and ferried us over to home depot for a length of pipe and then to Wal-Mart for some coolant. This bypass is necessary as hot coolant continually runs through the heater core in my car. With the heater core bypassed, the car was drivable, but cold as all get out as it was 20F out and I now had no heat. The car stayed like this for a month until I returned to the Chicago area from Indiana for spring break.
Moving back to the present, I took my car into a dealership that people on a VW bulletin board recommended, as my car has not been to a dealership in some 10 years, and its certainly not going back to the place we purchased it from, as we never had a good experience there beyond the deal we got when my parent purchased the car new in February of 1994. So car gets dropped off 10.30ish Monday morning. I don’t really expect to hear from them for a few days, they have to diagnosis it, they have to talk with VWoA, and then the have to spend an entire day replacing the part, so really, that Wednesday is the earliest I expect to hear from them. I worked Wednesday, and never heard from them, and also forgot to call them. Thursday on my way into work, I call them, and they tell me they’ll call me back shortly with the status of the car. Friday around 5pm I finally get a hold of someone while I am at work, and they tell me they’re waiting for approval from VWoA, but they can’t tell me how long they’ve been waiting. Monday right after lunch I call VWoA, and they tell me that they’re picking up 100% of parts and labor, that the repair is approved. So I immediately call the dealership, who again tells me they’ll call be right back once they figure out the status of my car. As I was leaving work around 6 I call back, and talk to some one who says they haven’t heard from VWoA, and asked if I had talked with them. I told them that I had indeed talked with them earlier that day, and that VWoA said the repair was approved, and that if they needed an authorization number, that they need to call VWoA. After placing me on hold, the person I was talking with came back and told me that he had found the authorization, and that work would begin the following day, Tuesday, on my car, but as the procedure is so long, it would probably be Wednesday before my car was finished. I had my wisdom teeth pulled Tuesday morning, so I was pretty out of it for both Tuesday and Wednesday. But again no word from the dealership. So what does this going on two week ordeal lead to? Today, around noon, I get a voice mail saying that they are currently waiting on a part to proceed with the repair.
It’s my understanding that the only part needed to replace the core is the CORE ITSELF. JESUS. They’ve had the car for nearly two weeks for the express purpose of replacing the heater core, and yet, don’t have the part. If this had happened last week, I probably wouldn’t be as annoyed, but seeing as I need my car back in one piece to drive it back to school in three days time, it’s suddenly gotten much more pressing. And when I say I need my car back together, I mean back together, replacing the heater core involves removing the entire dash, dropping the steering column, etc, which also means I had to pull all the custom wiring for my CarPC before I took it in, and I know its going to take more than an hour to reassemble the wires, switches, connections, and additional pieces of dash that I removed before I even dropped it off.