In the shop today
4.0t Turbocharger Replacement
Oh if we had a nickel for every time we saw an issue with the infamous screens on the 4.0t, well we’d have enough to repair one of these unfortunate failures. The common problem we see, which is well known and documented by now, is that the screen that is meant to protect your factory turbochargers on your S7 / RS7, A8 or pretty much any other vehicle with the 4.0l turbocharged cars , can become clogged and blocked with debris. In a tragic turn of events the very thing that was meant to protect your turbocharger now becomes an impediment to proper oil flow and sufficient lubrication. The irony would be amusing if it wasn’t such an expensive oversight.
Frequent cleaning of the screens can alleviate the possibility of the oil starvation, however simply removing them altogether is the more preferred method of choice for most. Unfortunately for the poor woman who owns this A8 she was not aware of this significant design flaw, and she suffered catastrophic failure to one of her two turbos.
A look at the culprit which lead to so much damage in an engine with well under 100k miles
While we were there, with things accessible we also took the opportunity to replace the pictured oil drain tubes that are another common point of failure. There’s no need to be going back into this engine this deep more than once any time soon.
You can see the result was a complete separation of the exhaust turbine which we had to skillfully extract from the downpipe after removing it from the vehicle entirely. We attempted to play the claw game with a flexible pronged tool, but no such luck
Instead of replacing the turbos with the expensive OEM units, we presented the customer with a lower cost option, which is actually more durable and higher performance than the factory parts. These turbos were sourced from Silly Rabbit Motorsports and can provide RS7 power figures, with proper software.