Yesterday I experienced total coolant failure whilst driving home. With no warning (and having checked the oil & water at the weekend) an internal alarm sounded, 'STOP' appeared on the dash and the temperature gauge swung to maximum. After pulling over I opened the bonnet to find a smouldering engine and cream coloured foam coming out of the expansion bottle. Needless to say that the car is in my usual garage awaiting repairs and I have been told that possible failures could be the cylinder head or even the oil cooler (didn't know it had one!)
Anybody had a similar experience?
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souns like head gasket failure to me. If your lucky the head will just need re-skimming. Incidentally how many miles has the car done ?
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It's done 81,000 miles has been fully serviced and was last serviced in march '07.
Any ideas how much the skimming would cost?
Thanks.
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I'm not sure for a Passat, a friend of mine had it done on Punto at a cost of around £150 + the cost of the new gasket, head bolts and re-assembly.
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worth checking the water pump impeller although it sounds like the damage could already be done
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Thanks for the info, guess I'll just have to wait and see what the garage find when they strip it down.
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Sounds like HG failure...would expect it to be c £7-800 job (at an independent...shudder to think what a dealer would charge!) but you should get a head skim, new water pump, cambelt and tensioner, oill/filter and coolant flush for this kind of cost.
Best of luck
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shipo
Sounds a very typical VW oil/water cooler failure. Has the oil level gone down?
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Yes, have the garage check out the oil cooler sealing - a common problem on these VW's. You may be lucky... Otherwise, if you've genuinely 'smoked' the engine then expect a big bill.....
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With you having checked the levels recently sometimes the seal on the expansion bottle cap dislodges and does'nt seal propperly after being relaced allowing the coolant to blow out passed the cap over time and over heating.
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Hope you're right about the oil cooler and I'm sure that the coolant reservoir cap was fully tightened before this happened. as for the oil level, this engine has used a little bit of oil over a couple of thousand miles but nothing out of the ordinary according to the hand book.
It's now with an independent garage so I will let you know what happens.
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Having read lots of similar symptoms Passat owners are experiencing it seems it can be a complete lottery when it comes to getting it fixed. My mechanic took a simplistic approach to solving the problem (he must read these forums because he knew about the oil cooler!), because the engine ran smoothly and a cylinder compression check was ok he bypassed the oil cooler and took the car for a spin. The car ran without any problem and so proved that the fault was indeed the oil cooler. With the new part ordered and fitted it took 4 flushes of the coolant system before all of the oil was out, but I have ran the car for over a week with no problems. I just hope that all of the other people that have had water pumps,cylinder head gasket or even worse cylinder heads haven't payed out for what they didn't need.
Thanks for everyones help.
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A 'sniffer test' on the coolant header tank takes but a couple of minutes and conclusively eliminates speculation as to whether the head gasket has gone or not. The problem is that 90% of garages are useless at diagnostics.
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