Vehicle
Volkswagen Phaeton
The full-size luxury saloon built at the Dresden glass factory, and the most over-engineered thing Volkswagen has sold — which is precisely what makes it a difficult car to work on twenty years later. It shares its D1 platform with the Bentley Continental GT, so Bentley material is often the closest thing available, and it carries systems that appear nowhere else in the range: four-zone climate with its own controllers, air suspension as standard, and on the top cars a W12 or a 5.0 V10 TDI whose parts supply is now the practical limit on any repair. Cheap to buy and expensive to own is not a cliché here but the central diagnostic fact — establish parts availability before committing an owner to a diagnosis.
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Generations
-
First generation 2002–2016
The Bentley Continental GT's platform; air suspension throughout, and a W12 and V10 TDI at the top.
- Body styles
- Sedan
- Platform
- Volkswagen D1
- Engines
-
- 3.2 VR6 — EA390 · petrol · 177 kW (237 hp) · 315 Nm (232 lb-ft)
- 3.6 VR6 — petrol · 206 kW (276 hp) · 370 Nm (273 lb-ft)
- 4.2 V8 — petrol · 246 kW (330 hp) · 430 Nm (317 lb-ft)
- 6.0 W12 — petrol · 309–331 kW (414–444 hp) · 550–560 Nm (406–413 lb-ft)
- 3.0 V6 TDI — EA896 · diesel · 165–180 kW (221–241 hp) · 450–500 Nm (332–369 lb-ft)
- 5.0 V10 TDI — diesel · 230 kW (308 hp) · 750 Nm (553 lb-ft)
- 3.0 — EA390 · petrol · 184 kW (247 hp) · 310 Nm (229 lb-ft) · China only
- Transmissions
- 5-speed automatic · 6-speed automatic · 8-speed automatic
- Drivetrain
- Four-wheel drive
Service information
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
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