VW had a few years making cars with chains that would catastrophically fail. Lots of destroyed engines. It was the EA888 put in Golf GTIs from 2010 and on. After like 5 or something revisions they finally improved the tensioner that caused the failure.
Previous gen GTI was a belt. Garage told me they preferred belts because people know they need to replace those. People aren't expecting to be told your chain needs to be replaced plus it's much more expensive and labour intensive.
Never heard of Honda having problems with chains, though. Some of their motorbikes even had gear driven cams! (VFR I think).
Can confirm, have a 2012 GTI, replaced the stretched chain on it about 10 days ago. The problem is that they provided no service interval for the timing chain when it really needs replacement every 80K miles. It’s an enthusiast car so there are a ton of aftermarket parts that are of good quality and VAG cars share so many parts (the 2.0T e888 engine is in a ton of vehicles from 2008 through today). My car has 211K and I intend to take it well over 300K.
Previous gen GTI was a belt. Garage told me they preferred belts because people know they need to replace those. People aren't expecting to be told your chain needs to be replaced plus it's much more expensive and labour intensive.
Never heard of Honda having problems with chains, though. Some of their motorbikes even had gear driven cams! (VFR I think).