A4 cabrio steering rack recall?

[hulewicz]

I've had my 3.0q Sport Cabrio for 18 months and all the time I have been complaining to my dealer about an intermittent grinding noise from the steering when on full lock. It seems that I'm not the only person to suffer from this: 4car web site

Well they have finally admitted that this is a known defect which requires a new steering rack. They also hinted that this was an official recall.

Does anyone have any more info?

Thanks!

[Milo]

Dominic - try posting this on the A4 forum - I think it is a well known problem and I think SilverCabMeister had to have the steering rack replaced on his 2.4 cab

[UBM]

Hi Dominic. I thought I might have had this problem, and enquired. It does not seem to make too much noise though. What was the reg date of the cab?

[Phantom]

I had my first rack replaced at 14k miles, then when I complained of the same problem they replaced it again at 17k. 27months of ownership and I am now on 60k miles with no further problems with the rack.

The grinding noise is actually a build up of pressure within the racks hydraulic system. The quote I heard was that the diameter of some of the pipework was too narrow causing some resonance problems.

Its interesting that this sort of problem appears to only be on the cab, whether it was the additional weight of the cab etc I don't know.

Oh and for the record I am also on my second CVT transmission too , it suffered from a juddering problem in slow traffic. This problem is also about as common as the rack problem from what I have heard. It must be costing a fortune for Audi to sort this out.

To top it off I have just had a recall letter saying that the Xenon reflectors will need replacing too !