Karlajustme said:We just aquired our 1997 Rialta about 2 months ago. We have several small children, one little girl recently potty trained. This is our awesome daily driver family vehicle. I've damage to the sciatica and was hard to climb on my 6" Lifted Suburban 2500. This one is so amazingly easy to get in, walk around straight, getultiple kids in carseats and carry my grandkids around, going shopping, take dogs around, and all at the same time. Oh! Needless to say I wont have to pull over to beg someone for a public restroom. The entire unit is so strategically designed and it fits all of our needs. It has several issues which I will address in separate postings. My husband is an RV repair person, we've a business in San Diego CA and we repair hundreds of RVs on a regular basis, and although VW are very unique, we are becoming sooooo very much experience. Therefore we feel that not only as Rialta happy owners, we will also help all around and of course learn crom you guys too.
09/12/13 I've had a lot more time to research our Rialta at multiple search engines and Youtube.com (which has being extremely helpful). Also spoke with previous owner who bought our Rialta back on 1999 I believe, so he knew all the history.
It happened to him that the EGR went bad in it multiple times (EGR price at the VW dealer is $480.00 + tax), therefore I decided to buy one at AutoZone (they had to order it via FedEx for me) because they provide Lifetime Warranty, my vendor there said they will replace it new every single time. So there, problem will be solved. Also bad EGR will cause for the system to run hotter which can/will result in bad gas mileage as well.
I also found out that the Valve Body wire harness goes bad often because the wiring coating is very thin, and since this transmission runs really hot, it messes the harness an the tranny starts failing, usually gets stock on 2-3 gear when going on a long hill. Every time that happens I have to pull over, shut the car off, get key out for a few minutes, restart the vehicle and is back to normal. I read the computer with our scanner and tranny fluid temp was 255 F. In order to avoid this from continue to happen often, I purchased an external transmission oil cooler which is suppoused to help big time with keeping the temp lower and therefore the harness will also last longer.
I'm very gentle to drive it, don't go higher then 65 mph, take off slowly, and I really care for my Rialta. I want it to last me for ever
Still working on figuring out why is it that the AC stops working, someone thought me in the meantime that when it stops working, I need to remove the positive battery cable from the battery while leaving the switch on ON position, then reinstall the cable to the battery (still with switch on ON position). Then the AC starts working perfect again. I talk to a few VW service guys and a few other technicians at different auto shops. And they say there is a relay or resistance between the engine and the AC, when the temperature starts getting high, it automatically desingages the AC to prevent overheating, which is great! However my running temperature is normal, therefore that relay/ressistor it must be bad.
Other then that....is all good and great. We love our baby...
Cheers everybody...
1997 Rialta 22' 6 cyl.
Linear Mode
