This is just a quick heads up for anyone thinking of getting a 2013 Passat; A mate of mine who owns 3 garages has just repaired a Passat with a fault that beggars belief.
A customer of his was driving his Passat (60k full service history) when the clutch disintegrated, it came apart that bad that it smashed the gearbox up and eventually came through the housing dumping all the oil on the motorway.
The gearbox was destroyed and needed a replacement, this was replaced with a VW approved recon box, the cost of the whole job was over 3k,
The best of it is the company that supplied the box said it was a common fault with the high power 2ltr tdi engines; they’d replaced countless boxes for the same fault.
My mate advised the customer to take the matter up with VW as it was that bad
Similar thing happened to me (2012 2ltr Passat estate) some issue with flywheel / clutch that shot a piece out of the clutch housing. Brand new clutch, flywheel, clutch housing and all associated parts followed (under warranty thank goodness). Never quite been 100% since. Didn’t think it was a common fault, wonder if anyone else has had a similar problem?
Many modern engines are fitted with a dual mass flywheel (DMF) these consist of two flywheels with a rubber connector the purpose of the rubber connecter is to isolate the transmission of the heavy load of power transmitted by modern engines in other words it acts as a buffer
The rubber link between the two flywheels can disintegrate and the clutch end can fly about and cause damage
If at idle yoy have a increased vibration in the car get it checked out
100k for Ford and perhaps a wee bit less if the car has been pushed hard or abused if used regularly for towing a caravan class your transmission as abused
Maybe we've just been lucky but we had the same car in 2012, from memory it covered 88k miles in 3 years during which time nothing - and I mean not one single thing - went wrong with it.
We're now up to 50k miles on the 148bhp 2.0 TDI, again (touch wood) with no reliability issues at all.