August 10, 2010

My Garage - Changing the Spark Plugs on the Passat W8

The Passat W8 started to misfire badly yesterday. I was a bit worried but I decided to start with the spark plugs. At 57K miles since the last change, they are a bit overdue (these should be changed every 40K miles). I have always have the dealer do it but I decided to do them myself this time. The process is actually pretty simple. You can find a well illustrated write-up @ the Passat World Forums. However, here are a few pictures of my car for comparison:


The upper manifold extensions need to come out.

I removed the EGR valve to clean the manifold.

With both out of the way, you can access the coil packs.

The extensions were a bit oily but these cleaned well.

The gasket appears to be re-usable.

I looked around town but couldn't find them so back to the dealer. At around $16 each, Auburn VW was pretty abusive on the price of the plugs.

Here are the plugs

A bit worn with 57K miles on them.

The good news is that the misfire is gone and our daily driver is back on the road!