Buying used Touareg - what to look out for?

[Marakai]

Hi all,

Coming over from the more regular Passat hang-out to pick the brains of Touareg owners:

Wife and I are thinking of adding a used SUV to the fleet specifically for horse-float towing. The Alltrack is fine for single horse towing (competitions and such), but sometimes we may want to or need to put two decent size horses in the back and that's beyond the Passat's capability.

Ideally, we'd stick with a VW (hence Touareg), instead of looking at the plethora of available SUVs from various Australian and Japanese makers.

The Sticky thread sadly doesn't have much, but I found this post (apparently from the UK):

Buying a used Touareg. What to look for. - myTreg forums

Is most of what's in there also something you'd want to look out for down here?

Any other pointers, caveats, gotchas VWWCers would add beyond these? Things that folks have experienced that hasn't been captured in the above posts/articles?

Thanks in advance!

[Transporter]

That's what you can expect here as well.
Before you buy one get it inspected by mechanic who at least has the VCDS, so he would be able to check for any faults in the system, since many of them will not illuminate (at least not straight away) fault light in the instruments cluster.
Checking the DPF, how much life it has remaining is a good idea too, should you buy the diesel.
Otherwise the Touareg is one of the better VW to buy as a secondhand. They didn't have many faults.
The 2008 V6 TDI is at Southern VW at Reynella for $30,000

[Marakai]

Thanks for that. That said, when buying second hand from private seller, how would you arrange for a mechanic check? Especially one with a VCDS console?

[Transporter]

You could either bring the car to workshop for the inspection or find someone mobile who is familiar with the VAG cars.