I Bought a $75,000 Twin Turbo V10 Super SUV for $5,000

If you say that you're giving me a V10 diesel Touareg for five grand, I'm not asking any questions. Everything is super over-engineered. My nuts. With install cost $9,361. That's like, that's the picture right there. That's the money shot. When I'm flipping this back, I'm bringing a trailer for three times as much. I bought this luxury four-wheel drive 10-cylinder twin turbocharged super SUV for just $5,000. So you don't have to. Because at five grand, what else could you get that's this capable? Five grand hardly covers the taxes on any modern diesel pickup, which this 15-year-old Volkswagen can drag with ease. The deal here is super enticing. And to be fair, this is a fantastic car. But well, you know what I'm going to say. It seems that the Touareg V10 TDI was developed completely around a spec sheet with no practicality in mind. Need to replace a starter? You got to drop the engine. Need to replace the alternator? You got to drop the engine. Need to replace your door speakers? You've got to drop the engine. Okay, well, maybe not for the speakers. But true story, my stepmom had to start an OnlyFans just to support me so I could continue driving this thing. And let's not forget, it's a diesel that's not particularly efficient at a time where diesel prices are historically high. So while it might guzzle its fuel, I found a way to become more energy efficient while working around the farm with my EcoFlow Delta Max. With six 20-amp AC outlets, a slew of USBs, and 2,000 peak watts on board, this portable power station is a real workhorse capable of replacing your old-school generator. Even big power tools work with ease on the Delta Max. To show you that the EcoFlow Max is a serious generator replacement, we're going to run all six of these power tools at once. Now if we left these all running, the EcoFlow's battery will still last a solid hour. And during a power outage, the Delta Max will effortlessly keep on your lights alongside a refrigerator running for several hours at a time. And when you utilize the optional solar panel, you can generate sustainable energy at the same time you power your necessities. If you get it pointed towards the sun in a good position, you can leave it standing up like this. But right now for us, the best is going to be lying down. Take the plug, put it right into the EcoFlow, and right now we're getting free power. And check this out, the built-in meter on the EcoFlow shows that right now we're generating 101 watts of charge, and we're only using about 44 to 45 watts of energy charging my jump pack, my cell phone, and my laptop computer. So right now this energy is totally free. I think the solar panel input is one of the EcoFlow's strongest features, but they've got this new bifacial solar panel which means both sides can let in energy. One side is good for 220 watts, the other 155 watts, significantly increasing the amount of power you can generate in the EcoFlow, making it really self-sufficient for activities like camping or RVing. And at any time if you want to increase the capacity of your EcoFlow, there's these little ports here with a couple of external batteries plugged in. The EcoFlow is capable of running major home appliances, even your home's AC. So this is a serious home backup in the case of a power outage. As you can tell, this is a very versatile source of power, and it's incredible what it can do. But EcoFlow makes a wide range of products to fit whatever you need. From the River lineup that is something portable, you can throw in your bag and take to the beach, all the way up to their Delta Max and Delta Pro models. Go ahead and check out EcoFlow at the link down the description box, and find the portable power station that fits your needs. Again, that's at EcoFlow.com, or just click that link down in the description box. Now if you ever watch my videos, you know that I'm quite fond of a good deal, and I don't mind taking on a problematic project. But one does not just go seeking a V10 Touareg. In this case, the Touareg seeked me through a channel viewer by the name of Miguel. Miguel sent me a message letting me know he was selling this car for his father. It was loaded, it currently did run with no check engine lights, which was shocking, and they were asking $5,000 for it. At the time, I popped open a few specialty car auctions to see what these things were selling for and was blown away. Similar cars with similar mileage were selling in some cases near or above $20,000. I asked Miguel where he was located, and he responded Arizona, which is on the opposite side of the country, over 2,000 miles from me. I let him know I would pass, as shipping fees here would greatly impact this sight unseen deal, especially with current fuel prices. And just a few days later, I saw a very concise sign from God in the form of a V10 BMW M5 on a flatbed being towed through town. I posted it up on my Instagram, where Miguel replied, come on, Sam, I've got another V10 for you. And I replied, drive it to Florida, and I'll fly you back. Miguel then DM'd me asking if I was serious, and between you and me, I totally wasn't. I didn't think too much into this as I was typing it, but I figured if this guy was crazy enough to actually drive the car 2,000 miles cross country and the car made it here, how bad could it be? Well, we're about to find out. I don't know about you, Sam, but from back there, it looks really good. Oh, it's looking nice. A little far away still, but it looks clean. How are you doing, dude? You made it. If you say that you're giving me a V10 diesel Touareg for five grand, I'm not asking any questions, any serious questions, at least. All right, that's why I'm the right guy to buy it. And I'm so happy that it's in your hands. Well, not yet. How much oil did you have to put in on it? Just two seconds. I did a quick little... Two quarts. No, just like a... Why did you reach out to me? I reached out to a couple others. I reached out to Touareg, Elliot Alves, and Doug DeMuro... Not Doug DeMuro, Hoover. Hoover? Hoover? Hoover. F*** those guys. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. And what did he buy, though? What did he replace it with? A Lexus GX 460. Yeah, he got tired of the $18,000 repair. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The glove box won't close. To get the glove box fixed, it's like $300-$400. Sure. When it's probably just like... It's a little lack. Yeah, that's it. Some Chinese guys knocked off a long time ago. I told you this on the phone. Shout out to Chinese guys. This is the way they used to make these cars with all solid materials and stuff. And you don't see that on the newer ones. They're really like cheap and plasticky. And when I'm flipping this back, I'm bringing a trailer for three times as much. I'm gonna put... I'm gonna put this in the... Look at this picture. Look at this. That's like... That's the picture right there. That's the money shot. You put that on, bring a trailer. That increases the value of this car like at least $6,000-$7,000. I called your book. No, no. So, from Arizona, over 2,000 miles away. A deal's a deal, Miguel. Let me get you some money. And I hope that it makes it to the airport because that's where we need to get you. It's gonna be a solid, solid ride. This... Look, this works. This works. Here. Watch how close it's like. Look at that. Like butter. Oh, you didn't... What is going on with this? No, I'm kidding. Nothing, kid. It makes it more aerodynamic. The wind comes through and curls around. Gives it extra five horsepower. Kid, come on. Come this way, kid. Come on. Now, this Touareg has had a small fortune spent on it at the dealer, as I'll show in a moment. So, it seemingly runs awesome with no lights on the dashboard, just like Miguel said. But it came with a few quirks that, in my opinion, really compromise its usability. First up is that three out of the four windows have problems. Two of the windows hang open and make funny noises when you try to operate them, which tells me the regulators are shot. And the other one does nothing when you hit the switch. So, let's start taking these doors apart and see what we can find. And that's why a job like this at the dealer would be a fortune. Sage has a door panel off right here. And there's this, like, metal sheet, which I'm sure just adds to the sound deadening and really the heft of the car. And you actually have to drill a bunch of rivets out to then pull this off. And then, obviously, we're going to have to stick it back in place probably with rivets, which is not too hard. But the window regulator is all located behind there. So, quite a bit more disassembly just to get to a simple window regulator. And look at this. This is the window module that probably just controls the up and down of the window. And then the motor is attached to that. And if you can find one, they're $700 or $800 new. That's why, again, these cars get very costly when they get old because everything is super over-engineered. And then look at this foam behind the door panel for, like, noise deadening and sound insulation. It's why the ride is so quiet in this car. We've run through two drill batteries, about four drill bits. And I think I'm just bad at drilling rivets and I probably have crappy drill bits. So, I've got a carbide rasp here just for the sake of time so I don't have to run out to the store. And I'm going to see if I can eat up the inside of the rivet and just they should pop out. Oh, that worked amazing. Dude, that took two seconds. Everybody run out and get these. My nuts. That's not the angle you want to do this at. Here, go around the other way. Come around the other way. There you go. I mean, besides the what? The weatherstripping holding? Is there any other thing? Yeah, we got these little things that need to get popped out and shoved through. So, they should come right off though. Yep. So, you can see all the wire twisted up in here. That's obviously a part of our problem. But since Sage is the window regulator master, I'm going to ask him, how does all this work? It's just like any other window regulator except this one has a lot of these little rivets in it, but you got to pop off. So, it makes that a little bit harder. But other than that, it looks pretty simple. But Sage, how does it work? How does the window regulator work? Yeah, why does it fail like that and what does it do for the window? I mean, it makes it go up and down. I don't know why it fails, it just breaks. Sage, I expected more of you. You know why it breaks? Well, I'm looking and I honestly have no clue. But looking at how it failed and then looking at our brand new part, we can kind of figure things out. So, right here is the plastic gear that came out of the old window regulator and that attaches to the motor. Obviously, what the motor does is it makes it spin like this. And whenever it spins, if you look at the new one, the way that the cord should be wound, it moves these cables up and down. That's what moves your cable up and down in the window. Over time, obviously, friction has frayed these cables, got them all tangled up and then you end up with this. Now, the big question, Sage, maybe you know this, why does this occur a lot on European cars but it never happens on a Toyota or a Lexus? I'm not sure why, Sam. Honestly, I don't know and I'm done guessing because somebody's going to tell us in the comments. So, let us know why Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW window regulators fail on a frequent basis and Toyota and Lexus ones don't. Bad. Talk about over-engineered. Look at this. Sage had to remove the entire door frame just to get the window regulator off because you can see the rivets. Those are up against the actual door skin itself. So, door frame has to come off. It wasn't too hard. No, it wasn't too bad. It was just kind of confusing trying to figure out what was actually going on. Yeah, I've never seen anything like this. All the window regulators we've done here, they get replaced while they're still installed in the door and if you look at this, by the time we have this cover off and then that frame out, all that's left is the skin itself and a bunch of broken up plastic from our old regulator. There you go. Solid. After our regulator repair on the passenger side and the rear driver's side windows, we are back in business here. Now, this window always worked and then the driver's side was a little funny. It would work intermittently and it was clear that it was a problem with the switch itself. So, Sage pulled the switch out, cleaned it, put it back in and now it works perfect. That's auto down and auto up. Now that we got the window situation figured out, the other thing that is making this car a nuisance to actually use is the fact that the glove box stays open. Now, you'd think this might not be big deal but with the glove box open, it turns all the interior lights on. So, when you're driving it at night, all the dome lights come on and then when you get out of it, the lights stay on and it kills the battery. So, if we close this, you can see nothing happens and unfortunately, the latch is built into the glove box door here. They don't make this anymore but we can attempt to fix it by actually disassembling it. So, let's go ahead and start prying this apart and see what we find. Sage pulled the cover off the glove box here. Tell us exactly what's going on and why it's not working. So, we got two springs down here. We got one right here and then one right there and you can see both of these little mounting tabs are broken right off. So, we need to rebuild these back up so we can get our springs back in and this thing can move freely. I don't think there's any good solution to this but what I have in my hands here is a little bit of plastic putty. Now, this is a two-part system that you mix with your fingers here. It's got a hardener in it and I'm just going to try and rebuild a mounting tab on either side with this and when it hardens, you know, you could drill a hole in it whatnot but these are so tiny. If you look at where the springs sit, I'm going to try and poke a hole in it before it dries so that we just don't break it off. Sage reconstructed the little mounts here out of that putty where the springs hold and now when we push the unlock button, you see the mechanism works whereas before these springs, they had just completely fallen out of place because it was all broken up. Alright, go ahead now with the latch on there. Yes, sir. Look at that. Look at that. It actually works. Unbelievable. You know, in the glove boxes of these old Volkswagens, there's a little easter egg. Some people that own cars like this might not even know exist but there's this little vent that actually runs off your HVAC system and a lot of people will tell you there's a little refrigerator in here but you can keep a bottle of water in here and it will keep it about the temperature of the car. It doesn't get as cold as the refrigerator but either way, check this out. We now have a working glove box. Besides just making things look a whole lot better, now we don't have to worry about the lights being left on and killing the battery. Now, when you're buying a used car, especially one that's out of the ordinary, everyone stresses the importance of it having some sort of maintenance history and if you have those receipts to show, generally, they can increase the resale value of the car. I would argue that if someone shows up to sell you a used car and the receipts are this thick and the car is anything short of a Lamborghini Countach, you're going to want to turn the other way and run as fast as possible. These are all the maintenance receipts from Miguel's father's ownership of the Volkswagen Touareg TDI. That is pretty much all that's in this folder and this thing weighs at least a pound and a half. I went and pulled out just a couple of the most ridiculous trips to the dealership with the sales receipts stapled to them right here so I could show you what it's like owning this car but the only thing that was in this folder that isn't a receipt was this original sale listing that was printed out and it's dated January of 2012. This car was being offered for sale used at a Toyota dealership for around $30,000, $29,848 and Miguel's father bought it with 85,000 miles on the clock. It's got like 180,000 miles now so let's just say he traveled right around 100,000 miles. So you think you're getting a pretty good deal on this car when you're buying it because look, at 30 grand, you're buying a car that's depreciated almost about 60% off its original price until you take it into the dealership and your thermostat goes bad. Now most regular cars thermostats are simple DIY jobs and thermostats run anywhere from like 20 to 40 bucks at the local auto parts store. The Volkswagen dealership charged Miguel's father $287.03 just for the part. Of course he had to add a gas, get some coolant, some hose and well he was in there he went and got it serviced. An oil change and I guess the rear seat locking tab was broken so he said just do me a favor and fix it all up while I'm in there. That locking tab cost $660. Of course there was labor on top of all that so just for a thermostat and oil change and a little interior touch-up this bill came out to $2,584. Now there are a ton of bills in this folder that are just like that with one thing that breaks and getting a few things fixed at the same time with the service on top of it. So that's kind of what you can expect from owning a car like this but what about when something really major goes bad? Now if you know anybody with an old European car that has an air suspension I'm sure you might have heard a nightmare story about their trips to the dealership with it and they're notoriously expensive to fix. Of course this TDI Touareg came standard with an air suspension and at 120,000 miles it went in because there was a warning light on the dashboard. One air shock, just one, which I'm amazed that the dealership didn't sell them two, was $1,794. That's just for the part. They charged them nine hours of labor to install it and I find that absolutely outrageous because air shocks or air struts or air springs aren't that much harder in some cases they're easier to install than regular suspension components. So in this case I think this bill is a total gotcha. There's no way that tech spent more than two hours putting in a new air shock in this car and on top of that when it comes to these older European cars there's a lot of other manufacturers that have rebuilt or recreated these parts for a fraction of the cost. I found one aftermarket part that's compatible with the Touareg, the Porsche Cayenne, the Bentley Continental, the Phaeton, pretty much all the cars use the same part here and it's $400 a corner. The total for this bill was $3,036.18. Now this bill is one of the cheapest that I found but it could be one of the most egregious of the entire lot. It's only for $500 and that's because the dealership recommended a software update for the suspension module. Could you imagine they recommend you come in and get a module updated and then proceed to charge you $500 which was them plugging their computer into the computer of the car and pressing one button. This is insane. Modern cars come with free updates and I can't imagine it probably changed the vehicle that much. I mean there was still a million times more that the car went into the dealership for repairs after this. So the fact that they were able to charge more than a half hour labor for something like this is disgusting. This dealership should be ashamed. All right I've just got a couple more and these are the big ones here. Customer states that the check engine light is on at 141,000 miles. Can you guess what it is? Well I thought it would be the turbo chargers. I left that one for last. It was actually the diesel particulate filters. They had gone bad. Each side is $1,350 and I can only imagine they had to drop the entire drivetrain to replace these things. While they were in there they did 402 sensors at around 200 bucks a pop. They were very generous and gave them a 10% parts and a 10% labor discount. Even with those discounts the total came out to $7,803. Now one of the other really crazy parts charges on this bill was for a flex pipe. It shows here as a manifold for $1,066 and that's because one of the flex pipes just started to rot out. It's a pretty common occurrence. So they sell these flex pipes at auto parts stores on Amazon. You can get them in different lengths. You can get them in different diameters and different shapes and they start at like $20. So the fact that he got an OEM Volkswagen one put in added another grand to the bill and is that really necessary for a car like this? Probably not. All right we knew at 180,000 miles the turbochargers had to been done. Unfortunately it wasn't done under CPL warranty. The credit card charge receipts are right here stapled to the bill. One turbocharger cost $1,836. Of course the car needs two. In between there's a lot of different hardware and gaskets and things like that. Two turbochargers on a Volkswagen Touareg TDI with install cost $9,361. So what I just showed you is all right here and that was the original sale listing of the car and a few receipts totaling well over $20,000 in fixes to that Touareg TDI. These are the remaining receipts for little things here and there that had to be done for this car. Receipts ranging from a few hundred dollars for an oil change all the way up to a few thousand dollars for little suspension components and things like that. This is a very needy car and it is why they have become so incredibly cheap. Now I'm wondering does a maintenance history this comprehensive and this extensive really add that much to the value of an old car like this or does it detract from it? Do we even need to talk about the power? I know everybody wants to know what this thing feels like. It's not like a rocket ship. It doesn't feel like a trackhawk or something but it has endless torque and when you put your foot to the floor you can understand why so many people use these things as towing rigs. Of course since it's a Volkswagen it actually handles really well too but foot to the floor there's just so much torque. All right now I've been pretty tough on the old girl here and it wouldn't be fair if I didn't at least tell you how I thought the V10 Touareg drove and honestly it is fantastic. I think that the ride quality is on par with most modern luxury SUVs but that beeping is definitely not something you get standard in most modern luxury SUVs. Anyway this thing is really heavy. The heft of the Touareg along with its air suspension just makes for a really cushy ride but an annoying one at that and considering this is a 2007 model year you get a lot of features that didn't come standard on cars until much later. Things like push button start or rear view camera you've got four zone climate control and well most of it works. All of it really works. There's not even a check engine light on the dashboard just that stupid light telling me that the hatch is open when it's clearly not open. I can understand why this car has a cult following and why people are looking for really pristine models and good condition. This could be a future collector's item. Now this one in particular mechanically is actually in really good shape but cosmetically it's a bit rough around the edges. The hood in particular needs a new coat of paint and in the interior well I think we made things much more usable by fixing these broken window regulators and the glove box latch. The driver and the passenger seats lower portions came all torn up. Now I look for replacement parts because that's usually the easiest and cheapest way to fix these things and unfortunately all I could find was one lower portion of a driver's seat in a cream color. I couldn't find this teak brown leather interior anywhere so I bought that and we attempted to dye it and it came out all right. The shade was a little off so the company sent me a darker shade and well it was a little off and mind you these were supposed to be factory color matches. Either way it looks way better than the way it came to me. Being a big fan of Volkswagens this is always a car that I've wanted to experience and being able to meet Miguel have this car for the last few months and kick it around and really understand what Volkswagen was thinking when they decided to make the V10 Touareg has been a great experience and I really had fun being able to share it all with you guys. If you enjoyed this video make sure you hit that like button. Also if you're not already following me on Instagram where I post updates and new project cars like the V10 Touareg before anything goes live here on YouTube well just visit me here click that link down in the description box. Guys I want to thank each and every one of you for watching today and I'll catch you very soon.