Dear All,

I am an unfortunate owner of a 2014 Passat 2.0 TDI and have since driven 103K KM / 64K Miles.

Since about 6-8 weeks, my car stalls in the mornings and/or when the engine in cold. Typical failure signature is a sharp drop of pressure and the engine comes back to life, only after I drop down to a lower gear.

About 4 weeks back, I took this to the VW dealership and the friendly chaps out there checked for codes, found nothing and asked me to drive straight over to them after such an instance, so that they can better diagnose the problem.

Since then, the problem continued to recur, but was mild in that the shift to a lower gear got things back on track.

After having driven about 3-4 KM last weekend, the customary stall happened like usual. Less than a KM on, the engine died and had to be manually re-started, but would turn off the moment I tried to drive. This repeated 8-10 times, before the engine seemed powerful enough to go on.

On the way to the dealership (with hazard lights on), the problem recurred and this time, the car shuderred a bit and sputtered. I could see white smoke in my rear view mirror.

The dealership initially could not replicate the problem and upon insisting, they drove a good 30km after which the problem was reproduced, but no codes yet again. They inspected the Air filter & the Engine cable harness; All seemed OK.

As a potential fix, they upgraded the software to the latest version (I already have the infamous TDI fix already installed) and drive about 60 KM across two days without noticing the problem.

In my first drive since picking the car up, the stall happened, albeit mildly, after some 5 KM of driving.

On discussing with the dealership, they stated that this type of problem (without failure codes) will be hard to diagnose. They wanted to perform further work on it and asked me to drop it off during my Xmas vacations.

Have any of you been hit with these issues?

Are there any known fixes for this type of a problem?

I am concerned that my car will turn into an experimental piece for the dealership and as always, at my expense. Besides, my car has that terrible Dieselgate software fix.

I would appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks for your time!