Bought a Cheap VW Phaeton - Big Sedan Challenge | Everyday Driver

this is the Volkswagen Phaeton hey guys what's up its Todd I have a brand new car to show you here it is it's a 2004 Volkswagen Phaeton and so yes this is a 2004 Volkswagen Phaeton it is actually my 2004 Volkswagen Phaeton on our podcast the car debate I've been bringing up cheap Volkswagen Phaeton since 2014 and have always thought it would be a riot to have one now Paul my co-host and I have both bought ridiculous old massively depreciated luxury sedans he got a maserati quattroporte for just under eleven thousand dollars I got this 2004 Volkswagen Phaeton with a hundred and thirty one thousand miles on it for five grand first place I want to start is actually the name there's a lot of discussion about how to pronounce this word it does come from Greek mythology it does have a lot of history however Volkswagen in their own material both for consumers and more importantly for their private internal stuff for salespeople and for text they show the pronunciation they want for this car fa y t om Phaeton the strange and ridiculous thing about these cars is this was Ferdinand Peaks last great idea if you will I mean this is the guy behind the Porsche 911 around the time that he was pushing Volkswagen to make the Bugatti Veyron he also said let's make the world's greatest sedan the crazy part about the world's greatest sedan was let's make it a Volkswagen that doesn't seem like what you'd have for the people's car but let's go with the guy he's had some crazy good ideas the story goes when he first commissioned this car he gave with the engineers 10 variables this car simply had to achieve all of which were near impossible 15-20 years later that full list still isn't published anywhere that I can find the one that has generally talked about is that it had to maintain 72 degrees inside the cabin while it drove 186 miles per hour on the Autobahn all day at a temperature of like a hundred degrees why that matters it is an important variable I don't know but that just gives you a glimpse at the madness that was behind what was required for this car and then let's sell it for $100,000 and then let's sell it as a Volkswagen genuinely the biggest struggle for this car in the US was only sold for two or three years and it was a sales disaster mainly because people don't shop Volkswagen for they're flashy luxury sedan people that are going to generally buy a big executive cruiser car don't want subtle and they do care about the badge you throw Volkswagen at that and it's simply not good enough [Applause] but the really cool thing about this car is it was being built alongside the Bentley Continental of the same era in fact the Bentley Continental GT the big 4-door quarter-million-dollar super sedan that Bentley made that is the sister car to the Phaeton in a very real way when you bought a Phaeton you were buying a Bentley Continental GT for less than half price I bought this car from Florida five thousand dollars it had neither of the known regular issues on this car which are apparently coolant leaks from the center of the engine block that's fun to fix and the front suspension failing it came off the truck it was about 50 degrees in Park City and I drove it for a week at 50 60 degrees before the winter really set in then I put it in for winter tires went out of town came back it was 20 degrees outside and the suspension decided you know what I'm a Florida car I give up that was instantly a $2,000 job to get the front from sitting down on the bump stops and being essentially undriveable the problem with a 5,000 other car in general whatever you buy forget fate ins for a minute is that it will need something it's being sold for five thousand dollars which means it's high miles there's lots of where it probably has problems you don't even know about the problem with this car though is because it is a five thousand dollar version of what was nearly a hundred thousand dollar automobile when you have to fix stuff the parts and then the labor to actually do things is far more than it would be if you bought a $5,000 Civic or in my case a mini this is a massive car you've probably even bigger than you think it is and the fact that it looks let's be honest like a Jetta means it has in your subconscious kind of an awareness of how big it is and it's nearly twice that size I do love it in black it has a nice subtle executive look about it now the chrome wheels are questionable that looks a bit gangster for me but I am the og so I guess that works this is a base Phaeton which actually means it does not have individual climate controls in the back it has a simple center console in the back it also doesn't have the fully adjustable with massage rear seats it does have 2004 remember heated and cooled front seats and they've done it with a single knob if you go into the positive guess what's that heated seats if you go into the negative that's cooled seats yes they still work and they work well I'm the third owner of this fate whoever originally bought this car clearly Specht it as a driver because they did pay extra for the 18 wave front seats these actually twist about every way you can possibly imagine of course with my weird long torso I'm still a little closer to the sunroof here than I would like think about 2004 that's pre smartphone in fact this car comes out three years before the iPhone does this was a technological marvel in 2004 now unlike today when everything is on a touchscreen this has a screen but everything is buttons as a result almost everything in this car in classic German fashion has a dedicated button to do what you would like the other thing here is that everything is more complicated than it needs to be the level of redundancy in this car honestly rivals most space programs two batteries in the trunk the one on the right side actually starts the ignition the one on the left side runs all of the electronics involved in here if you have a problem with the starter battery you can tell the left side electronics battery to help it start the car in a similar way there are two fuel pumps there's a primary fuel pump and a secondary fuel pump the problem with everything being redundant is that that means there's twice as much stuff that can and will break this car was designed with what they called a draft list HVAC system they are attempting for you to never feel air blowing past you now you can control whether or not these look I'll show you this nice wood panel slides up leaves the clock revealed and actually has normal vents that will blow on you now you can control how much those vents are open these are sliders here that you can actually turn the vent off y-you can't just reach up and spin a knob like normal cars it's because let's be honest it's the Phaeton in the center of the console here run into the clock there is yet another temperature control that is the temperature control just in case you would like the center vents to be blowing a slightly different temperature than what is happening at your feet do now of course I've gone into man you'll want to turn this on if I turn it off it will close those vents down again and it will go back to its full default setting which is draft list so you have no idea you can crank the heat up on this and you're aware of the fact that that all the heat is kind of emanating from your foot well but you don't feel it anywhere even on your ankles you don't feel anything blowing this center screen is the brain of the entire car and it was terrifying to text when it first came out and in some cases still is luckily your typical down the street tech my personal mechanic can hook up to this car talk to the computer and tell it what's going on remember this car came out before YouTube was a thing before the smartphone was a thing even about a year after the iPod a lot of the tech pioneered in here wound its way into other cars more specifically the Cayenne my wife has a 2010 Cayenne and the actual lights that are used here for the corner sensors are the exact same the mechanism that is automatic that actually is a button on your seat to raise and lower your seatbelt attachment point that found its way into the Cayenne a lot of this stuff you do see the parts sharing elsewhere in Volkswagen this is every bit as lengthy as any big executive sitting you can think of most big SUVs this is bumper-to-bumper about as long as those are all of that room plays out in the front seats of course but in the back seats you're simply luxuriating it's because of that size that I find myself regularly surprised by how capable this car is it has far more power than I would expect to when I look at the weight versus the actual power this weighs a thousand pounds more than they ate from the same era a thousand pounds because where they used to lumina m-- on the Audi they would no no steel for the fame this is the same 4.2 liter v8 you've got in the Audi s4 of the early 2000s so we're dealing with about 330 horsepower about 320 pound-feet of torque which is decent until you realize this is a 5200 pound car that doesn't seem like it'll be nearly enough power to move this car but yet when you get it on an open freeway here and you actually have to accelerate it's a train it may not jump off the line but it steadily built in a way that just feels unstoppable and once you get up to major freeway speeds it just feels like it's gonna do that indefinitely you can of course get the crazy w12 engine in this and of course those cars are lots more expensive than $5,000 also you add a big extra questionable variable to the ownership of this car there were enough questionable variables with all of the electronics and things that are known to go wrong on these I just thought you know let's just get the v8 and be happy the w12 on this car has more than a hundred more horsepower that would be nice but honestly I expected to get in and be disappointed and I'm frankly not the sport programming on this transmission actually makes it downshift quickly and find power readily when they released the Phaeton this was actually Volkswagens first ever six-speed transmission I'm going to go into the suspension because of course everything is controlled by this screen I'll turn the knob all the way to sport which stiffens that air suspension a little bit this is still a massive car it is not a corner Carver I'm also on winter tires I'm not expecting anything grandiose here but I have to be honest once you put it into sport mode it leans far less than I would expect especially because you're coming out of comfort where it leans a whole lot the first time I ever drove a fate is when this one got pulled off the truck and was already mine I'd never driven one before and Paul was pretty convinced that since I'm a guy that likes small involving cars I was going to hate this I have to tell you one of the things we talk about all the time is getting new life experience I like this because it is so different than everything else I have in my life of course it has zero I mean no steering feel at all this is a unbelievably light steering rack for pretty much the heaviest car being sold there's no steering feel whatsoever but at the same time I don't really care that that's not the reason that this car is designed it's designed to saw up miles and to be a nice executive Cruiser it does that phenomenally well in fact better than I thought it would especially for a 15 year old car alright huh that's that's an Autobahn speed in a 15 year old Volkswagen Phaeton with the bass motor and planted powerful ready to saw across the country this 15 year old five thousand dollar luxury car is still ready for all of that okay I paid $5,000 for it so let's do the five thousand dollar car review shall we what's wrong with it here at the steering wheel it's all mechanical it will still go in and out it will not go up and down the problem with that is I actually can't see the tops of the gauges I'd like this wheel to be about a half inch tires once I get above about 50 miles an hour I have no idea where the needle actually is pointing so fifty to a hundred I'm just blind so I just drive a speed that feels comfortable if I look around the wheel I realize most of the time that's 85 to 90 that's how stable this thing is at speed other things that are broken well the gas gauge comes to mind I actually ran this car out of gas and it actually died in my driveway when I still had just under a quarter tank of gas when I filled it up it said it only had 3/4 and I put almost 24 gallons in it that rear window is delinquent the trunk Ponder's a long time before it opens I'm missing a couple of little trim pieces on the front of one of the corner markers is gone I have a crack in one of the rear taillights okay all right this car SPECT like this would have been about 75 $80,000 when it was new in 2004 you convert that to today's money that is still at over $100,000 Volkswagen most people are never even going to consider that what's crazy about the fact that it was a sales disaster is they have dropped even more than other cars from their era Paul bought that Maserati Quattroporte for ten thousand nine hundred and that was an amazing deal we got these cars as a laugh and also as a discussion point but there was actually a GoFundMe many of you helped us partially get into these cars the intention is to drive them for the next year and actually talk about should you be this nuts should you actually buy a wickedly depreciated former expensive luxury sedan and drive it as a day late now I am NOT gonna count against it for the fact that I bought it for five thousand dollars and instantly put money into it that is honestly most five thousand dollar cars the painful part is how much that costs when you have to put that money in we're gonna keep a running tally of everything spent on these cars we're gonna have regular updates on them so that you know how they're doing I'm hoping now that I decided to completely replace the front suspension if that it just runs now there are in many ways cheaper ways to do everything you can put out II parts on this and get rid of the air suspension can actually buy refurbished air suspension struts and put those in I went ahead with new parts and just thought let's give this car the benefit of the doubt and give it the actual way it was supposed to be in a perfect world I would have spent more money and replace the rear shocks but let's at least wait till they break shall we folks I am following a Pontiac Aztek in the wild right there you want to know where they all went they came to Utah to die and they still haven't died but there he is Pontiac Aztek when it turns to winter time in Park City Salt Lake they appear and there one is that's actually a contemporary of this car I did better you could get one of those for $5,000 rather be here here at everyday driver we're one of the longest-running car shows on the web we are if you've been watching us since 2007 where you've just discovered us last week we are an independent Channel and still producing original content our TV show airs on the Motor Trend Network but you don't have cable all the episodes can be streamed on Amazon Prime we host a top 10 automotive podcast called the car debates with about 400 episodes and new ones airing every Tuesday and Friday so if you've got a question or need a car our podcasts can help you here on YouTube the fast blasts are still here they're gonna become a little simpler more like a video podcast actually mixed with a new car review let's still make well produce single car reviews of enthusiast cars look we're adding chance doing classics make doing motorcycles and even doing the occasional mountain bike reviews and if that's not enough we do have five feature films including one-of-a-kind generational comparisons of the Corvette the 911 and the m3 funky host meetups track-based and even a trip to the ring and spot we do all of that so thanks for watching listening sharing there's lots more you

Channel: EverydayDriver

Views: 470,302

Rating: 4.8428111 out of 5

Keywords: VW, Volkswagen, Phaeton, Big Sedan Challenge, Everyday Driver, Maserati, Quattroporte, Doug DeMuro, Stradman, Shmee150, Hoovie, Old, Driven, Comparison, Broken, suspension, Long term, Bought, Cheap, $5000 car, Cheap car challenge

Id: JqEKjuol_T0

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/orangekid92]

Title screams WIEEEZERDD Thumbnail screams THIIISSSS

[u/IntoTheMirror]

Everybody leaning in on the Doug spoof. Thanks Binging with Babish.

[u/apexwarrior55]

Didn't know this thing weighs 5,200 lbs.

[u/Gooseman488]

Todd has been talking about doing this since 2015ish so glad to see they are finally doing it. Paul being in a pickle fork qp5 is just the cherry on top

[u/PhotographyPhil]

This is the car designed to cruise silently on the Autobahn at 199 MPH

[u/ThawtPolice]

The most expensive German car is a cheap one haha, especially with the Phaeton