Last summer, we were planning on going out of town for my birthday weekend. In preparation for the trip, while I was at work, my husband brought the Eos in for an oil change. He said that both he and the guy at Lubex said they smelled a funny burning plasticy smell. On the way home from the oil change, my husband had to slow down to make a turn off the highway onto a service road to get home. When he slowed down to make the turn, he couldn't get the car back into gear. Luckily my mother was staying over, so between the two of them, they manged to get the car the rest of the way home by pushing and towing it.

I could not afford to have the car towed to the dealer at the time, nor did I have CAA/AAA, so the car was parked 10 months, unused. I tried to research and call the dealers to see if there was any recall on the clutch system, and was told there wasn't.

I researched on the internet to see if there were others in my predicament, but it seemed that most of the problems were with the DSG transmission. I had trouble finding anything pertaining to a manual transmission, but it sounds like others that wanted to buy a manual had trouble finding one for sale when they were looking, so I assumed the reason there wasn't anything about my problem was simply due to lack of supply of the manual transmission Eos.

My husband and I just got married a couple weeks ago, and really wanted the Eos for the wedding, so about two months ago, we did have the car towed to a dealer and checked over. They suggested it probably was the clutch and that they needed to replace it and a timing belt at a tune of over $5K. I phoned around and found a VW repair shop that would do the repairs for half that, so we towed the vehicle from the dealer to the repair shop.

The repair shop worked on the vehicle, and once they had everything out they told me that the clutch looked like it was totally mis-treated and abused, and that the only time they saw one in as bad a shape as mine was came out of a vehicle that had over 200,000 km's - never anything with less than 50,000 km's. The vehicle with over 200,000 km's was abused because it was someone that worked there and they drove it hard knowing they would be able to fix it when it did go. On the other hand, I have been driving standard for over 20 years, and have never had a clutch problem before. And since this car is my baby, I have never driven her hard. The repair shop also showed me how the double mast flywheels always have a little bit of back and forth movement, and that is likely what caused the issue. They said they like to replace the double masts with single masts when they do go, but apprarently there is not a single mast version for this car. My concern is, am I going to have to do the same thing in another 50,000 km's?

Anyway, once the repair shop got the car back together, and took it for a test drive, they said they couldn't get the car into 4th gear and that there must be a transmission problem too, but that will be filed under a different complaint (and we didn't get the car back for the wedding).