thegarageblog.co.uk : Nothing’s as easy as it looks!

In the old days, cars were fairly simple things. Any moderately keen owner armed with a selection of rusty spanners and a Haynes manual could fix the majority of common problems. There were no complex electronics and when a bit went wrong, you just unbolted it and bolted-on a new one. You generally knew when a particular part had packed-up as it was fairly obvious – a failed oil pump meant that the oil pressure guage would drop to zero. and the big ends would soon start rattling. Likewise, if you turned the key and it didn’t crank over, it could either be a dead battery, a dodgy starter motor or if you were lucky, just a corroded connection between them. If a car was running badly, people would say,”It’s probably just a bit of dirt in the carburettor” and quite often, it was true. In the 70’s, cars would need servicing at least every 6000 miles and every time you’d change the spark plugs, contact breaker points and condernser, oil and air filters and an oil change. If your car lasted long enough to ‘go around the clock’ and see the magical 100,000 miles, it was probably so rusty underneath that it’d be falling apart. It’d also be practically worthless as 100k was a LOT of miles ‘in them days’ and you’d never be able to sell it. Many cars needed new engines at 60,000 miles. One of my childhood memories is of waiting around for hours somewhere in London with my parents and brother, whilst our ‘Saluki Bronze’ 1967 Mk2 Ford Cortina (Reg. OPK 963E) was fitted with a ’reconditioned’ engine at some dodgy backstreet garage. I also remember the drive home and how, even at the tender age of 7, I was pretty sure the new engine sounded just as rough as the old one, and we’d been ‘ripped-off’ to the tune of 85 quid!

Thankfully, times have changed and there’s very few cars that can’t see 100,000 miles without any major problems. Even a well-maintained 1993 Mondeo with 140,000 miles on the clock might often require nothing more than a drop of oil between services, and still feel modern and comfortable to drive.

Of course, this increased reliability and longer life comes at a price. In order to meet modern limits on emissions means that a carburettor is no longer adequate to mix the fuel and air required for the engine to run cleanly. Every petrol-engined car now has an electronically controlled fuel injection system. Evolution has changed the old fashioned choke control you used to pull-out for a cold start, to an all-electronic system with a coolant temperature sensor that tells an ECU (Electronic Control Unit) that the engine is cold so it can squirt more petrol through the electronic fuel injector nozzles. All this is fine when it works, and means better fuel economy and lower emissions. If the engine used to ‘chug’a bit (or ‘run rich’), you’d usually find that you’d forgotten to push the choke in! Nowadays, it normally means a faulty coolant temperature sensor causing the same sensation as ‘the choke stuck on’.

Anyway, I’ll spare you the lecture in mechanics, and instead share with you one of the most pointless and frustrating aspect of this new technology and how it affects the everyday business of fixing cars.

One perfect example of how the simplest of jobs can turn into a complex nightmare that makes you wish you’d never started is the 1999 VW Golf we have in this week. The problem was simple – the temperature and fuel gauges have stopped working. Having checked the usual fuses and connectors etc, a little research on the internet showed that this is a fairly common failure of the instrument circuit board. A call to VW told us that a new dashboard was over £400, and as this particular customer is a car dealer, spending that much money is out of the question! A quick look on eBay found a decent secondhand instrument panel for £95 that was guaranteed working. With that bought and arrived the next day, it was a simple 10 minute job to fit it to the car. Turn the ignition on and great, the fuel and temp gauges come to life, but now the engine refuses to start and the immobiliser light is now flashing. We now discover that the instrument panel is ‘coded’ to the car and is part of the immobiliser system. It needs programming to the original key. Now, we have the latest key programming equipment, so I get out the box and leads, as well as the instruction manual. It says I need a PIN code from the dashboard to program it. So, I select the ‘Extract PIN’ option from the menu and after a while, the screen displays 3 possibe PIN codes. I try and input each one in turn, but they’re all rejected (and it thinks for 5 minutes each time!) I then read the manual for the key programming diagnostic computer and in very small print at the bottom of the page, it tells me that the VW Dashboard Programming facility is currently’Under Development’ By this time I’ve had enough and call the VW dealer to book it in with them. They happily take our booking, but then phone back 5 minutes later to tell us that it might not work, as the PIN code from the replacement eBay dashboard might not be erasable after all, but it’ll cost us 1 hour of their labour (£98 + VAT) just to find out!!!!! So, as it stands we now have one VW Golf with a working fuel guage but won’t start, or we can refit the old dashboard and it’ll start, but have no fuel or temp gauges. Either way, it’s not much use to anyone and is just taking up space that could be used for an ‘easy’ job.

Let’s see what happens tomorrow – perhaps I’ll be lucky and it’ll get stolen overnight. This is of course unlikely as it now won’t start! Oh well, it’s late now and time for bed. Let’s hope that my dreams aren’t clouded by visions of VAG PIN extract software and flashing immobiliser codes.