Audi Hatchback Range

If you look on the major online selling sites (including this one) you’ll find that there are plenty of cars like yours for sale. Prices seem to start around the low to mid-$30,000s with lots of choice in the mid-30s to low-40s range. Prices appear to top out (generally) around the low to mid-50s.

Audi buyers tend to be pretty switched on, so a full service history will make your car more desirable. But prices also vary according to whether the car is a sedan, hatchback or convertible and what options are fitted. Even the colour of a car like this can have a big effect on the asking price.

The best advice is to tap into some of these sites and find an exact match for your car and see what the seller is asking. Don’t forget that dealers will be asking more than private sellers and that what is being asked in the advert is not always what is being paid in reality.

If the vehicle was serviced though the Audi dealer network, there would be a paper trail you could follow by providing the vehicle’s VIN or perhaps even its registration details. If not, you’d need to know the workshop or service network that carried out the scheduled maintenance to try for a service history, but without a handbook, that could be difficult to ascertain. Contacting the previous owner (if that’s possible) is the best way forward.

But don’t ignore the obvious: Many workshops place a small sticker on the upper-inside corner of the windscreen to alert the owner of the next scheduled service, and this is a great clue in identifying who has worked on the car in the past. Check the glove-box for receipts and take a look under the bonnet for other clues, including dealer-network branding including oil-recommendation decals.

What you haven’t told me, Luke, is whether your car has a petrol four-cylinder engine or a V6 turbo-diesel. In any case, the petrol engine fitted to this series of A5 Audis used a timing chain, so it should never need replacing as it’s designed to last the life of the engine itself. That, however, has not been the experience of every owner of these cars, and timing-chain failures have been a hot topic of discussion on these four-cylinder turbocharged engines.

The V6 turbo-diesel, however, does use a toothed rubber timing belt, and that, along with its tensioners, does need to be changed at regular intervals. The trade reckons that interval should be every 120,000km or every five years, whichever comes first. That’s because rubber deteriorates with time as well as kilometres. The other piece of advice is to change your water pump while you have that part of the engine pulled apart. It’s a lot cheaper to do both jobs in one go than to open the engine a second time to replace the water pump.