Replacing the cabin air filter on any vehicle is usually pretty easy to do. The location where you replace the cabin filter tends to either be behind the glove box, or near the firewall in the engine bay. The MKI Audi TT’s cabin air filter is located in the engine bay on the passenger’s side. There is a small flap that needs to be opened in order to access the cabin air filter for replacement. It is typically recommended to replace the cabin air filter approximately every 10k miles.
As I work through the issues on my new-to-me 2002 Audi TT, I discover more and more things that need to be fixed. While I was fixing the secondary air pump in the engine bay, I happened to come across a set of hoses in front of the engine that were broken. These hoses are part of the N249 system, which is related to emissions. Because of the age of the vehicle and the exposure to heat from the engine, the piping on the N249 system tends to break, which can cause a vacuum leak in the emissions system.
My Audi TT sounds like a jet engine taking off every time I start my car, and I also have a P1432 trouble code. Replacing the secondary air pump fixed both of these issues, but it is a difficult job to do due to the limited access to the air pump’s mounting bolts.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen posts on forums and Audi Facebook Groups with people asking what any particular symbol on their instrument cluster screen is. Although it’s incredibly entertaining to read people’s hilarious interpretations of these symbols are, I wanted to just post this up so that it is easily referenced whenever anyone needs it.
I ran across a Facebook Marketplace ad for a 2002 Audi TT that was initially advertised as the 220hp variant of the 1.8T. However, the seller made a mistake… turns out it was the 180hp variant with a 5-speed manual transmission. I went to check it out anyway because I have always been fond of these cool little cars.
One of the easiest things you can do to spruce up the look of your E46 is to replace the emblems. Replacing the entire E46 emblem is very easy to do and it makes a huge improvement to the look of your car. To replace them, you simply need to pry them off and install the new ones. In addition to the new emblems, you might also need new rubber grommets as each emblem has two pins on the back of them, which will pop into the rubber grommets that fit in the holes of the car.
The BMW E46 has a lot of parts that tend to degrade and break over time. For those older E46’s (practically all of them at the time of this writing) will have some common problems on a majority of all E46’s. Some examples of this include a cracked windshield cowl, pixelated and/or volume button breaking on the stock radio, faded emblems, and the one that we will be addressing in this post: loose or broken kidney grilles.
