How To Buy Used Volkswagen Corrado VR6

as an avid Corrado enthusiast I'm often asked Doogie I'd like to buy a Corrado where can I get one how much should I spend I hear they break a lot what's broken all the time well if you have a burgeoning wallet I have a manhole cover you can slide over and dump it right down on into today we're going to take a look at the Corrado [Music] [Music] [Music] if you're on the fence about purchasing a Corrado I say go for it there is no better way to teach yourself the laws of mechanics than then to have a Corrado I got my first one when I was 17 and it's contributed significantly into Who I am today on this particular Corrado there's actually not a lot of rust this is a Minnesota car and it's pretty clean I got to admit this particular color is flash red I believe and on Volkswagen red there's no clear coat so if you see one of these and it's mostly pink as long as it hasn't been cleared and the clears peeling or anything obvious like that this can buff up really nice another thing about Corrado's is most of all of them come with sun roofs and it never works so in the early 90s if you wanted one without you had to special-order it that way and as a result ones without the Sun roofs are quite rare and it does give you a bit more Headroom when you don't have it but they're always broken luckily there's some solutions like using a one out of a volkswagen passat you can actually swap in the moonroof glass and the the moonroof assembly a conversion that is well detailed on the Internet this particular one has the factory BBS wheels looks like we've got some cross drilled rotors these things handle very well this was Road & Track magazines one of the best-handling front-wheel drive cars of the 90s and they're a blast to drive they're inherently expensive to maintain these cars came in two flavors g60 and SLC SLC's stands for Sport luxury coupe the g6 t is a 1.8 liter four-cylinder supercharged engine and this has the 2.8 liter vr6 the 6-cylinder is the desirable one to go for the they are a little bit more reliable but as far as G 60 versus vr6 goes G 60 is kind of a nickel and dime thing when it breaks vr6 is quite expensive when it breaks usually anyway they all have a central locking system and when the cars locked the fuel filler flap will lock as well so if you can't open this and you can't find the button unlock the car sometimes you have to go out into the passenger side and do it because the switch wears out on the driver's side that senses the key in the keyhole and then you can unlock it if you can't get in here for any reason you can open the hatch and reach in behind here and actually pull a little tab to open the fuel door this has an aftermarket gas cap on it but the factory one would have two little tabs so you could actually hang it on the fuel door it's got a bit of attitude to it and some interesting features that were unique to the early 90s one of which is active arrow this has a spoiler that goes up at 45 47 miles an hour and retracts at about 15 a lot of people say this is mostly for show but season corrado owners will tell you that this does make a difference on the highway on a windy day keeps the car planted [Music] you can't really find parts in abundance for these anymore but there are some great Corrado classifieds in Facebook there's a strong Corrado community that can always Network you with parts or somebody that that has the parts and you know there's a lot of DIY that goes into these as well there's stuff that you just simply can't find anymore and so it takes it takes a certain creative intuition to get parts off of another car or even come up with something on your own to fix it and make sure that it works right and it lasts there very rewarding cars to drive they're very rewarding cars to work on this license plate tub here they always break away on here there's actually some clips that are supposed to hold this two here along with some double-sided sort of adhesive trim tape and they they break off they fall off because you know gets picked up from here something gets pushed into it and this plastic is is aging and brittle and it can break and luckily there's a company that makes a replacement from spoon-fed tuning I highly recommend them for stuff like this they have a cover for the rain tray and like some nice door sill pieces and stuff and you can get a good quality reproduction from from spoon-fed so these taillights are the the factory units and they do actually have several different taillight options for this car the the clear all clear would be my personal preference it's not uncommon to smoke these and on the factory lights only the outer work the inner reverse light works but this lens isn't used for anything unless you're in Europe you have the European model and then there's actually a fog light that goes on the one side but what I do and I recommend this to most Corrado owners is you can actually put a pair of bulbs in there like the you knock out the blanking plate the bulb holder is already there you put in the bulb and then you wire it to the third brake light there in the center so you actually have four main brake lights instead of just the outside two I like getting people's attention that I stopping another thing worth mentioning on these is these roof molding strips if you're trying to keep a nice car it's important to acquire a car that has these in good shape because if you can find replacement ones there's $600 and people line up to pay that price so having a good roof moldings is important if you want a clean Corrado another thing is these door moldings on the sides here there's no mounting holes or anything they're just stuck on so you can peel them right off so that's your preference but they don't really protect the door this body line here is actually sticking out further than what the molding is so the majority of your dings and dents from shopping carts and other drivers is gonna be right here in this door area in the front of this particular Corrado I see we've got the badgeless grill the g60 ones had more slats in the grille the vr6 ones had this sort of three bar design but usually there's a badge here in the center personally I like the badgeless these headlights these are the factory u.s. headlights and if you've ever driven a Corrado at night you'll know that you can't tell the difference between whether they're off or on so if you're considering buying a Corrado one of your priorities especially if you like to drive at night is upgrading the headlights I recommend the European spec headlights that's usually what everybody goes with and that can run you between three and five hundred dollars for a decent pair of headlights and that's not including HIDs or any other options you might want to go with another thing worth noting is the turn signals on the g 60 cars these were actually in orange lengths and they moved to the more tasteful and elegant clear lens on the later cars but if it was 1994 and you were a g 60 owner distraught about your ugly orange turn signals it was easy as walking up to the car and running off with it and they still got their bulbs so it's all good there are places online that you can still get parts there's actually a couple of Corrado classifieds on Facebook that just deal with cars and part for the cars and the the community out there is great people are always willing to field questions and and help you with whatever issue you have and there are a lot of quirky issues on these cars these seat belts they always malfunction sometimes the motor doesn't work sometimes it jumps the track sometimes the cable inside breaks sometimes the switches go bad on this particular car the the switches have sort of failed and the seat belt just randomly moves and everything else usually what happens is it'll break and it stops at its forward-most position and then you smack your head on the thing whenever you're trying to get out of the car or whatever luckily VW thought a little bit about this in advance and they actually included an auxilary place to latch the shoulder belt on to so in the c-pillar here there's a vertical rectangular cover and you pop that off and then the little hook comes out that you can clip the shoulder belt into and then you have a static place that's safe to use the shoulder belt and then you can actually remove this out of its track so you don't smack your head on it every time you get out now on the lap belt in a Corrado typically when you use this you know you unbuckle it and then it flops back like this and you notice the Tang is pointing outward well this presents a problem in Corrado's because when you shut the door the Tang hits the door card and punches a hole in your door panel that's no good and so one of the typical procedures when entering and exiting a Corrado for me is I take this and I keep it on the inside and it tucks in there perfectly and so the Tang doesn't have to stick out and poke you or anything and actually just fits right down in there and that ensures that as you get out you won't brush across it and point it outwards and punch a hole in your door card if you look at a Corrado that's got quite a few miles on it almost certainly you'll find a seat belt punch or two in the door these window regulators in the Corrado they're quite strange first of all this is the only car I'm aware of that will allow you to roll down only one window at a time but at least it has OneTouch roll down on both sides and it seems to remember the decision you've made when you've wanted to do that so if I roll down this window and I push the button for that window it'll remember to roll down that window so that's kind of nice but also quirky the window regulators in the Corrado are inherently unreliable I've had at least three in each door of any of my cars and there is a company that does make an aftermarket replacement and it's more reliable than the factory units just a little bit more slower because it's a screw drive type instead of the cable drive that the Corrado came with now all Corrado's are equipped with central locking which means that this keyhole will lock all of the doors the fuel filler flap as well as the hatch and 92 and later you also get an alarm and so it's important to unlock this car before you know you open the hood or anything like that to keep from setting off the alarm but one real convenient feature is that if it's a hot summer day and it starts to rain you don't have to get in the car or roll up the windows you just simply insert the key in the door and hold it to the lock position and it closes the window up for you and on 93 and later models it'll also close the sunroof for you oh my goodness so this is the 2.8 liter vr6 this is a v6 an inline 6 at the same time they do that by staggering the cylinders and it allows you to package a six cylinder engine into a 4 cylinder engine space and as you can see there's there's quite a bit of room here most of us find that the room in back is ample for a large turbocharger and that's the route that I usually go this particular one's got a short Ram intake this just kind of heats the air if you do one of these and you have a golf or any other vr6 car taking a day and finding some sheetmetal maybe you got an old computer case laying around it's what I used on mine and you just wall this off here so you can pull air from down this used to be where the charcoal canister sat and so you can pull air from there you can actually plumb it on through and have a cold air intake if you like sucking up water when it rains but making a box for this and just having that temperature difference to get cold air up into here and make makes a significant difference one of the biggest things to look out for when you're considering purchasing a vr6 is the timing chains now the timing chains are on this side of the ends and they're actually right under this section of the valve cover here and this is the transmission side of the engine so if these chains have to be serviced for any reason you could you're pretty much guaranteed to remove the transmission to be able to perform that service and the way that you check them is you start the engine and you listen to it at idle and then maybe it like 1,100 rpm and you want to listen for like a churning sort of grinding noise from from this side of the engine and you'll you'll know when you hear it it's it's a very definitive sound when compared to the rest of the engine and the other thing that you'll want to look out for on these engines is coolant leaks there's a water pipe that runs across the front of the engine just underneath the intake manifold here it's called the crack pipe kind of looks like one I guess and it's known for leaking the thermostat housing is just under these sensors here and that's known to leak as well so it's important to make sure that that stuff doesn't leak at this point these all have enough miles you want to make sure the service was recently done and if you have to do it yourself or get in there for any reason go ahead and replace the thermostat with a low temp one getting one that opens at 160 instead of like 180 170 does improve the oil temperature significantly you'll often see water on the passenger-side floor board and a lot of people wondered ah maybe maybe the Sun rose leak and are the seals bad nope usually it's a lot more simple of a fix than that this is the rain tray area or scuttle panel for you European folks and you can see there's a lot of forested stuff left in here and there's drain holes like on the front side on the ends and these drain holes often get clogged with this debris and once those clogged and it rains and the water runs down the windshield it enters where the heater actually picks up which is under this cover down here and once water pools there it leaks into the heater box and then the heater box can't shuttle it out through the condensate drain fast enough so it ends up on the floor same with the Sun roof drains there our drain for drains in this car that also have to be cleaned on a regular basis and those two things together are the most common reasons why you would see water inside your Corrado this is the power steering fluid reservoir and usually how I check any of the fluid levels if I give the car a little bit of a shake and you can see the fluid jiggling around right about here an important thing to note with the power steering on the VR on the later vr6 cars is they do not use a regular power steering fluid you need to go to the auto parts store and buy the European equivalent it's called CHF 11s is what they typically stock at the auto parts store for that I believe presto now actually makes a product for European vehicles but the CHF 11 is what I recommend to anybody who has a Corrado the other fluids can be checked here this one here is the brake fluid and this also feeds the clutch master cylinder so if you are a clutch pedal gets wonky you think you might have a fluid leak or the master cylinder is going bad you can come in here and look at the fluid level and if it's actually down here towards the marks on the master cylinder reservoir for the brake master then you know that you've lost a bit of fluid there the clutch the clutch comes in at about this level on this particular reservoir and to check these I do that same thing I shake the car and as you can see this one's right up here with the level looks like it might be easier to see on camera there and then the coolant the fill line is actually the split between the top and the bottom of the coolant bottle I like to call this the golf ball it's shaped more like a golf ball in other cars and so yeah did you just fill it right up to that halfway point you can go a little bit over that's fine but if it goes much below that then you will get a blinking coolant light in your instrument cluster another thing worth going over is the radiator fans these are not necessarily unique to the Corrado but a unique sort of style it's one fan motor driving two fans and they're actually connected together by a little tiny belt on the front of the fan hubs if you want to change that belt you actually have to split the fan shroud from the radiator a little bit so you can reach down in there but if you're buying a Corrado you'll definitely want to check and make sure that that's there and you can do that by moving one set of blades and you can see the other set of blades is moving with it and so we know that our belts on there and and functional the fans do a couple of different things if you turn your switch in the if you turn your HVAC switch to the air-conditioning position it will actually run the fans on the low-speed after you drive and you've had the engine up to operating temperature after you exit the vehicle the fans will cycle and run for approximately ten minutes along with an auxilary water pump on the engine and that's to circulate coolant through the cylinder head because the vr6 is a very compact 6-cylinder engine the heat soak the heat rising and soaking into the cylinder head after you know an intense drive on a hot day actually has the potential to warp the cylinder head in more extreme climates and so VW solution was to fit an auxilary water pump which is located over here underneath the EGR valve it's like right under here that cycles along with the fans for that ten minutes to knock the engine temperature down if you are a Corrado owner who has removed your air-conditioning and you would like some auxilary cooling you can actually slide your heater slider or or not the 93 liters have a better looking - in my opinion but you turn the AC on that's non-existent and it'll at least run the fans for you so you have some sort of auxilary cooling if you're sitting in traffic or maybe you're sitting in the staging lanes at the race area or what-have-you another thing that you can do with the fans is get a different fan switch so up here next to the coolant reservoir this is the fan control module and these are known to go bad and give people problems so this is one thing that you might have to give some attention to if you buy a Corrado but you can also get different temperature versions that cycle the fans on and off sooner and that in combination with a low temp thermostat can give you much better oil temperature and coolant temperatures one more thing I'd like to mention about the vr6 specifically is you can't get an oil filter for these anymore at the auto parts store or at least I haven't been able to in the areas that I've been in the oil filter is actually this housing down here it points at the ground and it uses a cartridge type oil filter so you spin off the plastic cup on the bottom and then a paper element actually drops out and then you replace that now you can get these oil filters online there's still plenty of places that you can obtain them but if for some reason that if that doesn't work out for you a company by the name of Chimel performance Espie turbo calm I believe will shout out to you guys they make a nice housing that accepts the spin on style oil filter and so you don't actually have to use the cartridge one if you don't want to and of course the SP turbo oil filter housing has the appropriate provisions for adding a turbocharger or if you want an extra oil pressure gauge or a different oil temperature center they got you covered you know after assessing this car today here as it sits I'd say this is worth between 2500 and maybe 3500 bucks it's it's a nice solid driver there's some interior pieces missing but the seats aren't is destroyed is they typically are and there really isn't any rust on here which is impressive for a Minnesota car I must say so the this would be a good deal at two thousand to three thousand dollars you know the price on these seems to be appreciating so if this is a car that you think you would want to get yourself into now is the time to do it because in another five to ten years it's gonna it's gonna start getting up there and I'd like to thank Mike van for loaning us this Corrado today I actually have three Corrado's myself got my first one in 2003 and I've been broke ever since but I've had a lot of fun had a lot of fun doing it and if you have any questions comments concerns your suggestions hit that comment box below check out the description I got a website Doogie labs calm and I have my build build archives there from all of my vehicles including the Corrado's and I have tips and suggestions I also have a youtube channel you can search Doogie labs or Doogie Rick on my youtube and I regularly do Corrado videos and I help people out it I even had a guy who who asked me you know how do you how do you convert to a moonroof I needed to do it and just did a video about it for him and so it kind of became an instructional thing so and that's the thing about Corrado's and VW's in general i love this car community because you know people band together and we help each other out and it doesn't matter who you are or where you're from if you make an honest effort in this something you're gonna get reward out of your hard work so enjoy if you see one give that owner some props because it takes some hard work and patience to keep to keep one of these up but but it's a piece of history and it should be enjoyed so if you liked this video and you'd like to see more like it head on over to my channel we're gonna have more retro nineties car reviews coming up real soon [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Bill Owen

Views: 47,568

Rating: 4.9223299 out of 5

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Id: DN7BNKHlezg

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 28 2018