Passat imperfect

I emailed a few weeks ago about an unreliable 2006 VW Passat estate I bought. I have managed to sell it privately. I am looking at replacing with a SAAB 9-3 Sportwagon 150 TID, Vector Sport model. I have seen one, 56 plate, 49k miles on it, for £8,995 not from a SAAB dealer and am a smidge worried. I don’t want to fall into the trap of buying a jalopy again. Can you tell me a) when timing belt needs replacing and b) any perils of buying a high mileage SAAB and c) would you buy one? I test drove one the other night, nice, torque was great, dash bit olde worlde, but enjoyed the overall smoothness.
SAAB will honour the warranty until December 2009 despite not being sold by Saab dealer as long as servicing is kept up.

Asked on 14 March 2009 by

Answered by Honest John

Out of the frying pan. This has quite a dodgy Alfa Romeo diesel engine with a lot of problem areas. One is timing belts that need to be replaced every 40k miles together with tensioner, all pulleys and the water pump, failure of which throws off the belt. Other problem areas are inlet manifold swirl actuator failure (they can be ingested by the engine and destroy it), EGR problems, DPF problems and DMF problems.

Tags: buying used cars reliability

Dear Honest John,

Please help me choose my next car. I would like it to have:

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