I've got to agree with the "money pit" theory here. I've owned one VW, and never again. Most expensive car I ever owned maintenance-wise. I was going to replace a burned out headlight bulb myself, using a Chilton's manual for instructions. I could not locate a clip the manual told me to slide. Finally ended up taking it to the dealer, and the dealer told me the reason I couldn't find the clip was that the clip had broken off inside the housing. They then told me it would cost $600 to fix it.
Since I had been driving with the bulb out for six months without an equipment violation, it didn't take much math to realize that on average I'd probably get off cheaper just to pay tickets whenever needed for the life of the car. So I refused. Suddenly the guy was really accommodating and told me he'd fix it gratis. I figure they had already fixed it before giving me the estimate, which is kind of against the law. Only reason I could think of they'd eat $600. Regardless, the dealer shop seemed to have a standard policy that nobody got out of the shop for under $1000.
That, and apparently the brake pedal switch that both engages the brake lights and releases the shift lever was a disposable item. I went through four of them before I paid off the piece of crap and traded it. I did ultimately learn how to replace those switches myself, because it was a fifteen dollar switch and a hundred fifty bucks labor. After the self-destructing brake switch left me stranded once, unable to put my car in gear, I started carrying around a momentary switch on a pair of long wires that I could plug into the harness for the brake switch so that in an emergency I could use the switch by hand to get the car into gear and have brake lights.
Generally, carmakers are devoting more and more of their R&D time away from useful customer-facing features, and instead towards "features" that make it harder for the owner to maintain his own vehicle, and which maximally lock the user into returning to the dealer for maintenance. Don't feel bad if you're having trouble replacing your blinker bulb. VW invests a lot of effort into making sure that is the case. Based on my experience, if you're not finding the information you need on VWVortex, it's probably not out there. I'd definitely go back there for all my information if I were ever, ever going to own a VW again, which I won't.
Took me a while to do it, but I did all the work myself. Oh, and yes, the truck is still running a year later.
