Strange oil consumption in a 2010 Audi A4 2.0T Quattro

Question

I have a 2010 Audi A4 2.0T Quattro. Here are the facts:

1. I had an oil change several months ago performed by a shop that is quite familiar with this kind of car and has a very good reputation.
2. About a month after the oil change, my Audi suddenly complained that it was very low on oil. I should add a quart and continue to drive. So I did.
3. I made an appointment to get it fixed, but that appointment was several days out, so I continued to drive the car. I kept oil with me in the car because this was a daily occurrence.
4. The day before the appointment, the car said it had no oil and was shutting down to avoid engine damage. (Or something to that effect.) I had it towed to my house because in the interim it turned out I had to fly out of town and had to cancel the appointment. I'm still out of town as I write this.
5. I saw no evidence of an oil leak.
6. I saw no evidence of oil leaking into the engine block, such as smoke coming out.
7. The car performed beautifully until it didn't.

Full disclosure: I'm a software engineer whose knowledge of engines is not zero, but is rudimentary at best. But this is very strange to me. I've had oil leaks before (in other cars) and they are either visible on the ground when parked or cause the engine block to smoke or both.

To summarize:

1. Extremely fast oil consumption. A quart a day or more over several days.
2. No evidence of an oil leak.

Any thoughts on what this could be?

Answer 1

It's a known problem that Audi had a manufacturing defect between 2009 - 2011 on ALL 2.0T Petrol engines. They ALL use oil and to fix it you need to pull the whole engine out and do a complete rebuild with new pistons, piston rings, gaskets etc. I did this a year ago on my 2010 one in NZ and it cost $8000. Audi is aware of these problems and unless you push they won't fix it. I was lucky to have purchased a mechanical warranty which covered it. If you don't fix it the consumption will just get worse and worse. After I had it fixed the car went through 1 litre of oil in 14,000ks, so that is ok. Before I had it fixed it was using more than 1 litre per 1000ks. Good luck

Answer 2

Using the dip stick if you actually did see that the oil was low, then definitely there is a problem, There is a possibility that the piston rings may be leaking oil into the combustion chamber thus burning oil along with gas. Piston rings are like rubber seals around the piston that block the oil getting in to the combustion chamber from the oil gasket. So one will not see oil leakage anywhere.

But if the dip stick showed oil at normal level, there is a possibility that the computer unit in the vehicle is malfunctioning and switching off the vehicle because it is not able to analyze data correctly from various sensors.

Also check if while driving there is white smoke coming out of the exhaust. One may think its moisture but it could be oil burning.In colder countries it is difficult to analyze that since most of the cars give white smoke out of the exhaust due to moisuture in the mornings.

This is just my limited knowledge with my experience on my own vehicle. Please do update this post when you find the solution to the problem at the service station because audi is an awesome car and has a lot of intelligent electronics stuff in it.