On January 18th the car was already picked up from the yard in Seattle, packed into a container, and on January 20th it was loaded onto a container ship. On February 2nd the container ship left Seattle.
Looks like the container with the car is in for a round-the-world trip, with 3 transshipments onto other container ships. The route is roughly: Seattle → Shanghai → Bremerhaven → Klaipėda. Time-wise, that should take about 3 months 🤦♂️, arriving in Klaipėda around April 25th, then some more time to have the container opened and delivered to Ukraine. Also, by that point they should have passed the new customs clearance law and rules, and in my case customs clearance might end up a couple times cheaper (if I did the math right 😅).
While the car is sailing, I decided to slowly start gathering parts for the upcoming repair. Going off “guesswork” from the photos, I figured I’d need: the quarter panel, rear bumper, wheel liner, door, side skirt, taillight, and reflector.
You’d think you just open ETKA, punch in your VIN, pick the parts you need and buy them from a salvage yard or an online shop. Not so fast — this car, as I mentioned before, is fairly rare in Ukraine, and there’s basically no salvage yards with one here. I found one salvage yard here, but it had a pre-facelift version of the car, which automatically rules out parts like the bumper, taillights, and so on. I could only count on the doors and quarter panel from it, but even those were already gone from that yard. Okay, I thought, surely allegro has everything — nope, no such luck. On allegro almost all the parts are from European-market cars, and as we know, the equipment there can differ drastically. For example, the European A3 e-tron doesn’t have the side skirts or the S line spoilers — that “luxury” was reserved only for the US version. No taillight either, accordingly. Looking at parts from a regular A3 isn’t really an option either, since a lot is unique to the e-tron. And the bumper with the diffuser turned out to be outright rare — only the e-tron version has that one, and finding it used is nearly impossible. The only things I did find on allegro were the quarter panel and the door. But there was a catch there too — the door part numbers on the European version differ from the US ones, or more precisely, not so much by the part number as by the equipment code: for Europe it’s 5C0, for the US it’s 5C1. Open the PR-code decoder and you see that the difference is in safety parameters (metal thickness, load ratings, etc.) — they differ by market.
But that’s not a critical parameter. In principle the door should fit without issues. There weren’t that many options on allegro, about 5 to choose from, prices ranging from 300 złoty for a damaged used one up to 2500 złoty for a new one — and you still have to factor in getting all of it shipped to Ukraine somehow.
And the quarter panel on allegro was even more fun. There are two part numbers for the quarter panel, 8V4809837 and 8V4809837A, and on used quarter panels the Polish sellers list both numbers at once, which is flat-out wrong, because a quarter panel with an “A” at the end of the part number means it’s for a car that has the 3S1 or 3S2 option — which in turn are roof rails:
Which accordingly means the top of the quarter panel has holes/grooves for mounting the roof rails. My car doesn’t have roof rails, so I need a quarter panel without that option. But that’s not all — the Polish sellers cut these listings up the wrong way, not matching ETKA, but however’s convenient for them, and it leads to some idiotic situations. Compare the factory quarter panel from ETKA with a quarter panel from Polish sellers on allegro:
See the difference? And this is still a fairly mild example — under that same number there are a few even more interesting variants 😂
(yes, this counts as a quarter panel according to the Polish sellers)
Basically, allegro didn’t work out for me on any front. So I decided to order genuine new parts straight from the factory in Germany. I found people in Lviv who deal with this, and the price of the part already includes delivery to Lviv. And I’ll say it turned out not as expensive as I expected — some items came out to the same price as used ones from Poland with delivery to Ukraine.
By part number and price it breaks down like this:
- 8V4809837 Quarter panel – €919
- 8V4807067L Bumper – €455
- 8V4807434F Diffuser – €127.2
- 8V4854535A Inner sill – €53
- 8V4853859 Outer sill – €136.9
- 8V0810171C Wheel liner – €51.8
- 8V0945105 Reflector – €7.5
- 8V4945091A Taillight – €200
I found the door used, purely by chance, here locally. Someone had bought themselves a car with similar (but lighter) damage and was gathering parts the same way, but it turned out he’d be able to restore his original doors and wouldn’t need to replace them, so he offered them to me for $330 at cost.
So it turns out all the body parts will be genuine and new — more expensive than used, sure, but I’m restoring this car for myself and I want to be sure everything looks factory-correct.
The rest of the parts, in particular the suspension ones, I’ll look for once the car arrives in Ukraine.
In the next posts I’ll tell you a bit about my car’s equipment.