VW security system, a true nightmare

Hi all, as many of you may know, I'm a big fan of Subarus.
Our whole family owns and drives second-generation Outback wagons.
After an unfortunate accident last year, our youngest son totaled his Subi (no one was hurt)
Needing a vehicle to get to work, he quickly located a 2006 VW TDI Jetta, a 4-door car with a small turbo diesel engine, at a giveaway price of $750...
He loved it, said it handled like a race car, and the turbo diesel was super zippy.
From me, he received the side-eye look, with grumbles about knowing nothing about newer VWs (My last VW was a 1962 Beetle)
We/ he quickly learned that there is an entire line of tools that only fit VWs... Despite having three stuffed tool chests... I did not own any... I made him buy them...
Then he learned that common parts like brakes, wheel bearings, struts... all cost more...
But these past two weeks, he/we have gone to school on what we now know to be an infamous security system, known as a Skota IMMO system.
Used with all VW vehicles since 2000.  
A three-part system that must be synced perfectly, or your computer thinks the car is being stolen and activates the immobilizer system.(IMMO)
A small light on the dash will flash: a car symbol with a key.  As long as this light flashes, your car will start for apx 2 seconds and shut off.
There is nothing easy you can do to bypass this system. Your car is simply stuck wherever you may be.  With luck, in a city, a quality mobile locksmith can come to you.
The underlining problem here is the locking barrel that the ignition sits in. It controls the locking steering wheel. This part is known to fail. When it does, most people keep trying to turn the key... usually violently. When you do that, you destroy the IMMO connection. However, you will not know this for a while yet. First, you must remove that barrel; it uses breaking head bolts that you must drill out... takes hours; your locksmith or mechanic will be taking his wife out to a fancy dinner at your expense...
If you're unlucky like we were, after removing and replacing that locking barrel, and your car won't run, you rent a trailer, then load up a car that is super heavy but won't run for more than 2 seconds...
You trailer it 65 miles one way to a locksmith, who charges $150 in cash to try to program your new ignition switch and keys... with no promise it will work!  
In our story, this did not work; the replacement part from Rock Auto did not identify itself with the computer.  A $180 switch with keys made in Germany has to be removed and returned!
After many phone calls and hours searching the internet, we discovered the dirty truth.
The only place you can buy a switch with keys is a VW dealer, for the minor cost of almost $400.
You have to give the dealer the VIN number of the car, and it takes 10 days for them to program a new keyed ignition switch with a spiffy new fob.
This piece fits in the palm of your hand; without the keys and fob, it is about the size of your thumb!
All for a car that is twenty years old... talk about a long term rip off...
An honest car company would have timed that system to stop functioning after 10 years...

When my Subaru blew its motor this spring, we borrowed this car from Bill in Helena. I drove it home. As reported, it is a zippy car, lots of quick acceleration.
We filled it with diesel in Helena; it is 260 miles home. Then another 50 miles back to Plains the next day. It took 6 gallons of fuel for 310 miles... that's 51 mpg at 80-90 mph
Needless to say, I was very impressed.  Front Wheel Drive, low to the ground; it is absolutely NOT a Montana winter car.
BUT...I started looking on Marketplace; perhaps I should find one of these for a summer road trip car...
After spending the last three days struggling to make a simple new key switch work, watching the boy spend hundreds of dollars.
Finding out that VW continues to rip people off twenty years later... No pucking way!

I wonder if I can stuff one of those little 1.9 diesels into a Subi outback???

a local parts supplier programmed a new aftermarket key for my 2005 golf a few months ago. I think $80 for the blank and cutting it (which felt pretty steep) and $40 to program it and change some other miscellaneous settings (I can now roll the windows down remotely, which I guess is nice?).

those mk4 TDIs regularly make it past 500,000 miles. a million miles isn’t out of the question if they aren’t abused. and at better than 50 mpg, the fuel economy beats some hybrids. make some small modifications to the body and driving habits and that number will go even higher. they also do well with homebrew biodiesel (or veggie oil with some relatively simple modifications).

your story certainly sounds frustrating. but even after getting fleeced by a dealership, that initial price tag means the total cost of owning the thing is still real low.

ultimately, any automobile is a tool. maybe a particular one is the right tool for the job. maybe it isn’t. I would personally rather be biking.

In my fantasies, I've done both TDI and Kubota/Yanmar diesel engine swaps into older Ford/Nissan/Toyota light pick-ups and drove off into the sunset......  ;-)

But in reality, still hoping our early 2000's fleet of vehicles will hold out a bit longer.  As for Subi's, I do have my eye still on the new EV Trailseeker.  But the scuttlebutt around that and similar vehicles is that the main drive or 'traction' battery is a slave to a smaller 12V lead acid battery (!!! I kid you not!) that runs the wake-up, computer, and digital connection circuits.  Although concerning detriments to this engineering appear to be getting better rapidly with expanding complaints, the 'beta versions' initially sold to the public often will just die after sitting a few days unused.  That is because, even with the car turned off, the computer digital interface with company HQ is in constant communication....and draining down that 12V battery!  It can drain it down far enough that the 'start up' sequence for driving the vehicle is inoperative and you are stuck with a very large paperweight until you either manually recharge the 12V battery or swap it with a good one.  Additionally, one can apparently turn OFF the communication with the 'Mother Ship' and just have.....imagine!....a functional CAR!  I don't know if there is any other sequence that must be done to start the vehicle, once a charged 12V battery is in place....but WTF??  Really seems like a bad PR decision not to have this working when selling to customers.  And Subi isn't alone....this appears to have plagued several, but not all, manufacturers.  Oddly enough with the other praises coming in on the vechicle, I'm not deterred and will simply wait a year or two more for the kinks to be worked out.

It is true that your tool box is going to get bigger if you work on newer VW's. That TDI diesel when working is a great motor. It would be wrong on a US car to install some of the performance parts available  only out of Canada but I hear that they are available. I see the VW diesel put in Suzuki Sidekicks here.  I am happily driving my Subaru Baja now as my daily driver, but have Suzuki sidekicks as my secondary vehicle that work well in cascade snow if we get any.

And so, a quick search showed me that, indeed, I can adapt a VW TDI engine to my Subaru Outback manual transmission. (or automatic!)
https://subarugears.com/product-category/adaptor/
Will I do this...   if the stars line up perhaps I will.  First thing I need is a complete, running TDI engine...
I will start there; if one makes itself available, it might just have to come home with me.

The potential of engine swaps and other retrofits intrigues the same part of my brain that likes putting Linux on old laptops.
So I went digging a bit. Turns out,
there's a forum for that
(over at TDI Club).

Hubby has a really old, sporty Toyoto something that's been up on blocks for years. I've told him that before he can buy a new car, he needs to repair that one. I think it would be easier and safer to drive...

We bought a new Jetta TDI 4 door in 2010. It was a great little car and we had it until 2020. We put over 220K miles on it and gave it away to a couple we knew who really needed a decent car.

The only issue we had was that there was a phantom draw on the battery that ended up being from the touch screen console. We got an old non touch screen installed and never had any issues. Never had any security issues.

However, it was part of the "diesel gate" scandal and I imagine part of what made the car so great was the VW paid out a bunch of money over it and we ended up with about 12k all together just because we bought that car and they did illegal stuff with the emissions. So that made the brand new car in 2020, like 8k bucks, technically.

We got 45+ city and 55+ hwy mpg. When they made the emissions changes, we lost 5-7 mpg on both of those figures. Somehow that just does not make sense to me on how that was better but I don't remember all of the details.

A TDI in an Outback sounds pretty neat.

Sara, Thank you!
You beat me to it. I have favorited it and will dive deeper when I have the time.

Sara Hartwin wrote:The potential of engine swaps and other retrofits intrigues the same part of my brain that likes putting Linux on old laptops.

Never ceases to amaze me what these guys do in their garages:  A Ford Ranger and a Jeep converted to small, efficient diesel (very short clip)--   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiDJVv3vUMU

Jackson Bradley wrote:
We got 45+ city and 55+ hwy mpg. When they made the emissions changes, we lost 5-7 mpg on both of those figures. Somehow that just does not make sense to me on how that was better but I don't remember all of the details.

the cheating was about nitrogen oxide emissions. improving the efficiency of diesel motors often makes them hotter, which increases the production of nitrogen oxides.

I hate to bring this up....caveat emptor
Diesel in the EU is now 8.90$ per gallon if gallons were sold.   🇺🇸 prices are over 6$ , and that's up 60% since a year ago.
Does anyone think prices are coming down soon?  Reading yesterday's news did not fill me with much confidence.  That 55 mpg is not such a bargain when compared to gasoline at the mo

Hi Rico, it sounds like fuel will keep costing more and more, not much we consumers can do about that.
But running the numbers...
My Subi gets a nominal 28 mpg
The VW got 51 mpg
In Montana today, on-road diesel is selling around $5.50, bump that up to $6 a gallon and my trip would cost $36
Gas is currently $4.60 a gallon, eleven  gallons would cost me over $50

I'm keeping my eye on the new electric Subi Trailseeker.
Once they work out the bugs, it might become a viable option for us.

Thomas thanks for the Montana terrain, it sure varies in my travels across the lower 48.  I was just using national averages for the comparison.  
At our local stations , we see 6.15 for diesel per gallon. whereas i  Just filled up my Honda Fit with gasoline today at 3.92 per gallon.  
The Fit averages 44 mpg with mixed city/ highway, that is over the latest 1000 miles. Much different machine than your gas car, different strokes for far flung folks.  

it's so interesting to see the US map and register the differences....we are 7 hour drive from Gulf coast refineries, perhaps that makes a big impact on price?       (Certainly state taxes affect the price too, in March or April our Governor Brian Kemp stopped taxes on fuel for months, in response to exploding fuel prices.  That lasted two months, if memory serves.    Now we have full taxation again.  )  In the long term, I hope that us blue collar workers see some help on prices , only God knows when that will come to pass.  

Addendum:
This is on the record, and  what initially made  me leary of sporty diesel cars , not just complicated VW engines but in general.  Look at the percentages!    If global trends continue for fossil fuels, the farmers (  perhaps needing fertilizer AND diesel 2or 3 times per year   ) and all of us should  pause , consider how to adapt.

Over the past year in the US, the average price for diesel has risen by about 63% (from roughly $3.70 to over $6.05 per gallon) .....wow.  
That is 2 days back, when seeing  this on AAA.
Regular gas up by about 35% (from roughly $3.19 to $4.29 per gallon).

Hey y'all, is there a permie revolution afoot?,,,, Go green now

Rico Loma wrote: Over the past year in the US, the average price for diesel has risen by about 63% (from roughly $3.70 to over $6.05 per gallon) .....wow.  

My friend drives his old diesels and 2-wheel tractors on Biodiesel from used restaurant deep fry oil.

Catches are:
1.  modern, fancy diesels can't use that stuff from my understanding.
2.  most of that deep fry oil is either being produced by growing Canola in huge fields using diesel tractors
3.  or in palm oil fields that are damaging ecosystems and it gets shipped across oceans by large ships running on fossil fuels (although experiments are being tried with alternative assists, I'm not holding my breath.)
4.  as costs go up, most people I know are eating out less, therefore the restaurants won't create as much waste oil.
5.  competition for that oil, already exists... so more demands on that resource could create problems.

They are great but quirky, my son invested in the special mechanic skills and tools so we all had them for a while. They are not nearly as cheap as they used to be around here.

That era of BMW had a limit (of 3 or 4) of number of keys that can be programmed for life. So don’t ever buy an old German car unless you know you have at least one good key.

I drive a 1982 diesel vanagon with a 1.6 liter engine. Verrrrrry slow. A lot of people swap out those TDI Jetta engines and put them in these vans. At the moment I’m trying to sell my van, but maybe in the future I’ll think about doing that.

These engines go great in vans. I recently got an off-lease 2018 Caddy Maxi cargo van with the 2.0 L TDI and 6-speed dual wet clutch gearbox. It's got heaps of torque and is surprisingly quick off the line...not a lot of turbo lag. I towed a tandem axle lowboy trailer to collect a piece of equipment and it drove like there was nothing behind it on the highway. I can stack eight pallets in the back and have room for sacks of feed and tools. All this and if I keep to a top speed of 90 km/h I get 5.4 L / 100 km (43 mpg) lightly loaded. So it's about as good as I'm going to get for a 2.5 cube 3/4 ton payload van in the world of fossil fuels (which I am hoping to check out of again soon, but didn't have the budget to do it on this round).

However, given the amount of technology that is knitted into the drivetrain, I expect that if I want to keep it reliable and on the road I will have to shell out for the premium service and not even think about going the shade tree route like I used to do with vehicles back in the day.

If your car was a MK4 (1999 to 2003) with the ALH engine, (the "best" VW TDI) I could help you.
Not real familiar with the 2006 TDI. Might be a BRM engine.
There is such a thing as an immo delete.

If you own a VW TDI, you should have VCDS/ vagcom.
The good thing about having a computer-controlled car is you can use a computer to troubleshoot problems.