Great info, I will make sure to look over that area for rust.
For the listing, one little problem... according to google: 2,293 miles, 1 day 14 hours drive time.
Not to bash the current owner, but I don't think they know much about working on cars in general since they didn't know about the head gasket issue until they drove home with it. They are basically clueless about the engine in the second, and any question about size of engine etc is ignored/missed in the replies. Might end up being a steal with 1 truck with a bad brake line and the other with bad motor mounts and a rusted floor pan.
For the Golf/Jetta engine TDI swap out, I wouldn't mind the extra power, but looking at what others have done it kind of kills the point of buying the tiny truck, max MPG. Around 35mpg isn't bad for the hp output. The truck will mainly be for the travel to work (37 miles each way), but once in a while I need to haul something small, or tow something that this truck should do fine (at slower speeds)
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If I do get the truck, I'm hoping to beef up the front end some to add some strength and I watched some crash tests of the golf and it don't do a lot till the A arms of the front tires start taking the blow. Besides that I would like to do a couple aero mods, belly pan and possibly some sort of aero topper. Nothing super extreme, but would love to be 50mpg average all the time and hit 60-65 peaks for a fairly low goal.
Here are a couple of videos to compare the vw golf (same front end as caddy) to my 92 Camry, mind you that the Camry is a much larger car (mid size) ~2200lb vs 2932lb.