That will buff out.
After driving the car for a couple of weeks, we didn’t pick up any significant issues or notice any faults with our regular VAG-COM scanning. This means that instead of worrying about costly repairs, we can start thinking about more cosmetic repairs and upgrades to help our vehicle stand out more from the fleet of performance SUVs already on New Zealand roads.
One of the first things we had to address on our SQ5 was the state of the wheels. The car was factory fitted with a beautiful set of Audi Sport 21″ wheels. However, it seems that the previous owners in Japan had a vendetta with curbs and decided to use the massive wheels to exert dominance wherever they went. The result was curb-rash across all four wheels.
Lucky for us, we contacted the guys at https://www.wheelmagician.co.nz/ who sent over one of their top technicians to restore our wheels to their former glory. The great thing about Wheel Magician is that they come to your office or place of residence and perform their repairs on-site. This means you get your car back as fast as possible. The results are excellent. Except for some slight paint colour discrepancies, it is a massive improvement.
Adding some lighting upgrades.
It’s the year 2020. Incandescent bulbs were amazing when people were used to bonfires and candles – but times have moved on, and so should the tech inside of our car. So as a matter of urgency, we replaced all of the interior bulbs with bright white LED bulbs. Not only does this make the interior lights way more effective at actually lighting their space, but it also looks more up-to-date with the times. There are a couple of kits available online that allow you to do this. We decided to go with the Ziza Master Kit from https://www.ecstuning.com/
We then headed to eBay and decided to add some questionable bling. Why eBay? Due to legal issues, Amazon can no longer sell unlicensed products specifically designed for Audi (and other brands). Also, eBay tends to sell products that are more “fun” and not necessarily practical and clinical. That means we can get multi-coloured LED interior lights, projection door lights, and other car accessories that are not officially licensed.
In our bargain bin, we added; Blue footwell LED units for both front and rear seats, Audi Sport door projection modules, and some “Supercharged” badges to replace the V6T badges on the front fenders. It’s interesting to note that the door projection modules, as well as the “Supercharged” badges, can be purchased from Audi as OEM parts, but the price difference is astronomical and, honestly, the difference simply isn’t noticeable enough to justify spending a large amount of money on these parts.
All of these upgrades were installed by ourselves in a couple of hours. The door projection modules were fitted without issue. They were completely plug-and-play. The blue footwell lighting modules were a little more tricky. The modules look OEM, but they do cater for various Audi/VW vehicles which means they are slightly bigger (height-wise) than the OEM modules. That’s nothing that our Dremmel tool couldn’t sort out and it really wasn’t a show-stopper. The other interior LED bulbs from ECS Tuning were also easy to install and we’d rate the installation difficulty a 1 out of 5.
Next up on our shopping list – performance modifications. Stay tuned.