First noticed a problem with our 2002 Eurovan when driving up a residential street. The front end felt as if it was bucking/bouncing, so we pulled off the side of the road to inspect the vehicle. Did not find any problems, but when we tried driving off, the transmission started slipping in 1st and 2nd gears so badly that the front end rattled loudly and violently. Luckily for us, we were only a block away from home. The next morning, I drove the car and noticed that the slipping had ceased so I decided to drive it to our VW dealership and as I was driving on the freeway (in morning traffic), the transmission failed and was stuck until the transmission cooled down enough to pull off the side. All transmission services have been completed as per schedule and now have to pay around $5,500 to replace it. No independent will touch this thing and the factory warranty on a new transmission is only good for 12 months/12K miles. Nice to see that Volkswagen will stick by its product! not!!!! so now the Eurovan sits in my driveway, until such time that we can afford to put in a new transmission or get someone to purchase the vehicle with a busted transmission.

- Corona, CA, USA

This car is the third of four cars, in a two-driver family. It is not driven frequently. One day, we noticed that the car would not respond normally to reverse gear: It did not like any throttle when in reverse, but seemed to drive O.K. when in drive gear. The next time that we drove it, the same thing happened, but this time, it did not respond normally to forward drive gear either. I backed it out of my driveway slowly, and began to drive it down the street. Very quickly I realized that it was not responding and parked the car on the street and called the tow-company to have it towed to the dealer. Dealer reported that the car had a broken transmission (only 60,000 original miles on it), and the repair cost was $5700. While this did not cause a serious accident or death, it definitely would have, had I ignored the matter and gotten on the freeway. I contacted several transmission shops and they all said that they will not repair the transmission because it was too complicated. One VW specialist even said that he had seen this exact problem (low miles, transmission failure) on other similar models. He indicated that the transmission used in this large van was the same as that used in the VW jetta (small sedan). I then researched to see of other similar cars had failed transmission and saw one on ebay with exact same year/model with a failed transmission. I strongly believe this is a design flaw and a potential danger for anyone who continues to drive this car on the freeways. I believe if anyone had access to the VW statistics on transmission failures on this car, they would see a high percentage of failures at low miles. Perhaps this is the reason why VW stopped building this car after 2002!

- Gold River, CA, USA