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The second-generation Volkswagen Touareg (2011 to 2018) was also sold as a hybrid. It combined a supercharged 3.0 V6 petrol with 333 hp and a 47 hp electric motor, for 380 hp in total. A workshop in Romania recently rescued one of these engines when it was very close to destroying itself.
The symptoms
The car arrived on its own wheels with 266,000 km (about 165,000 miles), a noise from the timing drive and a long list of stored faults: a cylinder misfire, catalytic converter efficiency, a crankshaft and camshaft correlation error (the classic sign of a stretched timing chain) and faults on the intake manifold flaps.
The intake fault turned out to be someone else’s mistake. During an earlier repair, the flaps that route air to the supercharger had been installed incorrectly, so the supercharger never did its job. The engine ran rich, smoked, and built up carbon. It drove worse than a naturally aspirated V6.
What was inside
- Oil leaks almost everywhere once the engine was out of the car.
- Broken timing chain guides, which let the chain go slack and lose camshaft timing.
- Several timing components already worn by the loose chain.
- Good news in the oil pan: no metal particles.
- Bad news in the transmission: metal particles in fluid that had not been changed for a long time.
The shop fitted a complete new timing set, corrected the flap installation, refitted the engine and changed the fluids in the transmission, the transfer case and both differentials. The engine was saved before the chain could jump a tooth.
You can see the whole job in the video below. Automatically translated subtitles can be turned on in the player settings.
The lesson
Two things nearly killed this engine: a slack chain nobody listened to, and a part installed the wrong way round during a previous repair. The second one is entirely avoidable. The factory repair manual shows the exact orientation of every intake component, the timing chain procedure with the locking tools, the tightening torques and the fluid specifications for the transmission, transfer case and differentials of your Touareg.
Our manuals are the manufacturer’s own service information for your VIN, delivered as a PDF with working hyperlinks: click a step in the index, or a connector in a wiring diagram, and you go straight to it. No scanned pages, no guessing.
- 2011 Volkswagen Touareg factory repair manual
- 2012 Volkswagen Touareg factory repair manual
- 2013 Volkswagen Touareg factory repair manual
- 2014 Volkswagen Touareg factory repair manual
- 2015 Volkswagen Touareg factory repair manual
- 2016 Volkswagen Touareg factory repair manual
- 2017 Volkswagen Touareg factory repair manual
- 2018 Volkswagen Touareg factory repair manual
