Oh, you've never seen just how convoluted a VW engineer can make a car.
Try changing a tail light on one sometime. On an ordinary car, you'd give the bulb receptacle a quarter-turn, release it from the housing and pop the bulb out and pop a new one in. On a VW, the owner's manual tells you to take it to the dealer. If you're brave enough to risk it, the process includes removal of a backplane, retained by 18 tabs. Once you've got that out, try to figure out the sequence of twists, turns and tabs to get the 1 out of 7 bulbs you need to replace (and hope you identified the right one). On a Japanese or American car, it's a 2 minute affair - on a VW, it's a half hour, easy.
I once saw a Passat wherein the VW brainiacs decided that they wanted to install the engine in the standard longitudinal fashion (as opposed to transverse, like nearly every other FWD 4-cylinder car on the planet). In order to accomplish this, they had to have the exhaust manifold right next to the air intake (in other words, the worst possible position to put it in). So, they installed a tremendous heat shield to try to keep the intake air as cool as possible, but in doing so, they couldn't make the air filter housing accessible. So, where changing an air filter in most FWD 4-cylinder cars can be done by a trained chimp, on the Passat, you'd better devote the afternoon to painstakingly disassembling the engine bay.
I always thought I might like to own one someday - a number of them are very attractive, but I was steered away by my more mechanically inclined friends. Now I know why.
