Forgive me readers, for I’ve been foolish. In an effort to make my little hybrid econobox a bit more fun to drive and even cooler to look at, I ordered up some progressive rate lowering springs and H&R sway bars from ECS Tuning. There isn’t much information out there on modifying an Audi A3 E-Tron, so I was taking a few leaps of faith here. In poking around at listing after listing I found most sway bar manufacturers list sway bar fitment as “all FWD MQB models,” except I found out the hard way that the rear bar doesn’t fit, no matter what I do. Let’s get into it.
I woke up on Sunday morning with the required motivation and weather to get some shit done. The plan was to spend a few daylight hours installing the lowering springs and both sway bars, but the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. For one thing my Quickjacks and garage are tied up with a long-dormant project car that I posses just enough hubris to believe I’ll get to one day. So I’m working on the Audi in the driveway, on jack stands, in mid-December.
It took me about an hour of finagling to get the stock rear sway bar out of the car. Did you know these things use plastic sway bar end links? That just won’t do. Thankfully I also ordered quality metal adjustable end links. Once the bar was out, I thought the hard part was over, but then I started trying to fit the new H&R bar, and it all spiraled out of control.
When something isn’t going your way while you’re wrenching, do you ever just lay under the car dejected and depressed with your head in the gravel staring into the void? That’s how I felt after the third hour of trying to get the sway bar to fit. In order to get more clearance I dropped the exhaust, took both rear wheels off, and disconnected both rear lower control arms. Oh boy, this isn’t going well at all, is it?
It’s difficult to tell from the image above, but the stock sway bar is a slightly different shape than the H&R bar, and there’s a very good reason for that. Where the aftermarket bar kinks upward to be out of the under-car airflow and create better ground clearance, the stock bar dips down slightly. Man-handling the aftermarket bar into place, I did a lot of doubting myself. What am I doing wrong here? As it turns out, the stock bar dips down in the middle to clear the E-tron’s battery pack, something a GTI or A3 2.0T don’t have to worry about.
So at about hour five of this horrifyingly elongated job I reluctantly moved on to the lowering springs and put the stock bar back in with the new metal end links. Buttoning everything up should have been the work of a moment, but I lost three pieces of hardware in the gravel driveway, and it took a bit of doing to find them. In the end, the rear springs went in much easier because the suspension was already blown apart, so I popped them in, reattached the control arms, and bolted the wheels back on.
I think the lesson here is that things don’t always go perfectly, even if you think you’ve planned accordingly. I wanted to get all four corners of the car finished before sunset (which is an admittedly early 5PM these days), but all I managed to do in seven hours is give my Audi A3 a slight Carolina Squat.
I’m significantly more confident that the front sway bar will fit, but a stiff front bar without a stiff rear bar is just going to make the car understeer more than it already does. It’s possible that a sway bar from an all-wheel drive MQB machine will have a downward dip to clear the rear differential, but in order to know for sure I’ll just have to order one and find out. A more known quantity solution would be to import a stiffer rear bar from the Euro-only Volkswagen Golf GTE, the plug-in hybrid GTI which used the same drivetrain (and thus battery pack) as this A3 E-Tron. Nobody really modifies these, so there aren’t many resources out there. Hopefully my debacle can be used to prevent someone else from making the same mistake.
Things don’t always go your way in car wrenching. Try not to get too discouraged.