Engine radiator OEM Volkswagen or Nissens

The Nissens are inexpensive and mine has been trouble free for ten years.

I put a Nissens in my 1992 325i cabrio and it fit perfectly. It’s been in there for seven years now and all is great. My car was an automatic when I bought the radiator. I later had the car swapped to manual and plugged off the transmission cooler ports on the radiator.

just replaced one and aside from slight issues with the drain plug alignment that needed some finessing, seemed fine and held pressure.

me and some E39 buds here in the Netherlands have great experience with nissens. It's a pretty good package all around and had a copper core instead of alu.

I had an early failure of a Nissens and have switched to a cheap all aluminum unit, which is working well for me.

I remember when my First Radiator blew up at 20108 miles, just out of warranty, and the Dealer ship was going to sell me another Plastic/Aluminum one for the mark down price of 120 bucks. I found a radiator shop that got me a Brass and Copper one for 108. It lasted for the next 19 years with out failure.

I use nissens brand rad (Danish manufacturer) and so far so good.

I recently replaced the radiator on my MK1 TT. After getting the old, leaky radiator out of the car, I compared it with the new one and was surprised at just how different the core designs were!

I imagine, if done right it could be stronger than original. But unless it's a really good radiator, I'd replace it with one of those $70 nissens.

Be careful with the early MK8s. Mine is a 2022 and boy howdy she's got issues. Shift knob broke, steering wheel capacitor issues that disable travel assist repeatedly, backup camera failure and others say they have issues with the radiator failing to be fully seated on its clips and causing big problems.