I am hearing so many mixed opinions.

I went through the same thing, and read numerous opinions on here.

You will find anecdotes from "I beat the piss out of my car from the moment I left the lot, and the car runs great a gazillion miles later" to "My buddy babied his car and now his burns a quart of oil every 1000 miles" to "My pal ran his car easy and now it gets great milage."

It can be very frustrating, but I wouldnt obsess over it.

In the end, I decided to follow the owner's manual pretty much, especially for the first 300 miles, trying not to take it over 3500-4000 rpm.

After that I took it *generally* easy, occasionally taking the revs up higher for short bursts when showing off the car to friends (but not wide open throttle or to redline). I'm up to about 750 miles now on my 2.0T and so far so good, and at this stage I'm gradually asking more and more of the engine.

There is some consistency in what I've read though:

Everyone seems to agree that what you DON'T want to do is take the car out on the highway, set the cruise control for 65 mph, and leave it there for hours on end. Vary your engine speeds... take it down to 50 mph and then pass some poor bugger at 70 and then back it down.

Second, everyone seems to agree that you can take all of this advice with a grain of salt, since these engines are engineered to such tight tolerances that the conventional wisdom about break-in is less important than it used to be.

But in the end, I generally followed the owner's manual.

Seriously, I don't trash the car but I will stretch its legs once a day or so, and I've done this on 5 other cars. 32,000 miles on my GTI and not one mechanical problem what so ever. Engine runs strong, doesn't burn oil... I dunno, I don't think any one break in method is better than the other, just don't go pegging the speedometer on your first day.

http://www.mototuneusa.com/break_in_secrets.htm

One of the guys swears by it here and he never had a single problem with his cars. Reading through it - it does make sense.....

Heat Cycling using almost those exact same methods.

So I should just drive my car moderately hard?