Hi Mike, Varta G14 is the retail equivalent, assuming you don't order the OEM one from VW Parts.
I ended up purchasing a Duralast Gold from autozone. It's actually Manufactured by DieHard of Sears. it's money back for the first 3 years. you get half your money back if it dies in years 4 or 5. Oh well lets hope the Duralast treats me good.
Thank you for this excellent write up. Made switching out the 11 year old Varta a breeze. Locally cold temps caused negative strap reconnect challege due to stiffness. That and the mass of the big AGM we're the main challenges.
My oem battery lasted from '08 to '13. The last few weeks the car would hesistate to start. The starter would click click, dashboard lights would flicker, and the ECU and CANBUS would reset. I'd lose the auto windows and see my trip odo reset, but the battery read 12.5V and alternator read just fine too. I waited until the day I had to jump-start the car then drove to VW and bought a new OEM battery; I believe it's a Varta. After I installed new battery the starting issues went away, but I got stuck where the car would go "clickiddy clickiddy clickiddy click" and dash lights flickered like mad; new battery too! I took my multi-tool and started beating on the connections, leads, and grounds. I found the ground wire to be a bit corroded. After cleaning the terminals with 120 grit and a whopping dose of dielectric, car starts like brand new. The starter is pretty tough.
Varta makes damn good batteries. One in my Rabbit lasted almost 5 years.
My GTI's original Varta battery lasted 7 yrs with normal driving/ number of starts.
2 weeks ago, I brought in a totally dead, 16 month old Duralast battery to Autozone. The girl threw some meter thing on the battery, saw that it was bad, and swapped it out for a brand new one.
I replaced mine also with the G14 and no problem at all, so it should work or your old battery broke becasuse of a defective module jorg
Here is a picture of the left battery that the factory put in my W12 when it was new. As you can see, it is labelled both 'Varta DE' and 'VW AG'.
duralast has giving me nothing but probs.
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