CzechTheFridge

Bro. Good luck with repairing broken crankshaft and conrods with common handtools at the side of the road. As I said, the BXE is generally said reliable, BUT it has this one production fault and you would be wise to fix it before you use the car further. I would worry about it, because fixing the original cause will cost you tenth of a price of the car, while fixing the engine failure will easily cost you more than the car itself. We were lucky, the failure was not so fatal, we fixed it for 1000€ on 4000€ car, but we were seriously considering just scraping the thing.

I didn’t say it’s unreliable, 200k is of course nice. I just wanted to warn those who think that regular maintenance will prevent this. It won’t. If you want to be sure this doesn’t happen, you need to fix it before it happens. What does even reliable mean? I think it means you can rely on the car, when you go on a vacation and expect it to drive you home as well.

My fathers Octavia II BXE had around 220k when crankshaft broke along with two connecting rods. The car had good maintenance, oil changes on time, no prior problems, handled with proper care - my pops is truck driver, so he never ever reved it over 3k. It is possible that year 2008 bears higher probability of this problem because of wrong torque on crankshaft bearings bolts. Any way, if you want to be really safe, replace the bearings and bolts, because the engine failure really cannot be prevented by otherwise excellent care and happens without prior warning signs.