VW can eat ALL THE DICKS.
I had to replace the front strut tops & bearings because they've been using the same, s*** ass design since the 1970s Rabbit. No big deal, right? It's just a couple of struts. How hard could it be? (bang)
Instead of having a couple of bolts that go through the bottom of the strut, like say, with a Mazda Protege, where you undo the 2 bolts and the end link and the knuckle falls free of the strut, the German Engineers decided to go with a collar design. What happens, do you think, with friction-retained, metal to metal connections, after 11 years and 80,000 miles? They become practically welded together, that's what. And there wasn't even rust! It was just stuck as all hell.
30+ minutes with a sledge hammer. PER SIDE. To get it knocked loose. I haven't sworn that much while working on a car since I replaced the ball joints on the Miata without really having the proper tool. Once that was rectified, it was easy peasy.
And here's what really pisses me off: If they wanted to be clever and actually take their head out of their collective ass, it could have been made pretty easily serviceable. If the collar itself was threaded instead of having a nut and bolt, you could put something in the "split" then run the bolt in from the threaded side and use that to force it apart, making it pretty easy to drop the knuckle off the strut. But no, you've got to wedge a pry bar in there where there's virtually no space for a pry-bar, with one hand, and shmang it with a sledge-hammer with the other.
Or they could have just made a design that isn't retarded to do any service on.
What a piece of s***.