Tag Archives: Volkswagen

Cars

An Annoying Fault

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Hopefully this won’t be the start of a Golf grumbles category, to go with the category full of Focus grumbles, but the Golf has developed a bit of a fault. Currently it’s at the annoying stage, the kind of thing that I won’t take it in to the dealer for specially, but will get them to look at the next time it’s in for a service.

Faulty Dashboard 2

The fault is easiest to see in the pair of pictures here, and is with the dashboard lighting. The Golf has a system whereby when the car is unlocked, if the ambient light level is low it will switch on the headlights and internal lights automatically. It will also illuminate the dashboard in the normal night mode as if the headlights were turned on manually.

However, on Saturday night, it did all this, and just as I started the car, suddenly the dashboard behind the headlight controls, and on the central panel containing the courtesy lights switched back to day mode, whereby only the headlight switch is illuminated, with the automatic mode highlighted in green. Having said that, it didn’t seem to make any difference to the operation of any of the controls, or the car, so I drove home with it like that, and when we got home, took a look at the problem.

Faulty Dashboard 1

Having said that, when I got home and turned everything off, and repeated the same process it worked fine. I put it down as a temporary glitch, and went to bed. However, last night it did the same thing again. This time I tried a number of techniques to try and solve the problem. Restarting the car didn’t seem to solve it – the illumination would start up correct, and then change back to the single green light. Ultimately the problem just seemed to go away – after a couple of goes turning the headlights off and back on, it just seemed to stay in the right mode. Indeed, when it subsequently did it this morning, it seemed that the problem goes away after a couple of minutes – however you have to turn the lights on and off to get it to go, it’s just that it doesn’t come back after the car has been running for a bit.

Of course, being an intermittent problem that goes away when the car is warmed up, it will be just the kind of problem that the garage will spend ages trying to disprove, hence why I took the two pictures, just to prove it. It strikes me that it will probably be something pretty simple, and almost inevitably in one of the many microprocessors that are buried in the car. Since the car is still under warranty, it will be the kind of problem that will be fixed at VW’s expense too.

Cars

First Fill Up

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I’ve just filled up the car for the first time since changing jobs. Looking at the usage aside from the trip to Abingdon on Friday it has been three weeks of commuting every day, and the usual mix of local running around for domestic duties like shopping, Church and so on. When I was working for SSE, the similar mix of commuting and local domestic duties required a fill up every week. (Also worth considering that with the current price of fuel around here, a fill up usually costs over £40.) So looking at the result of the move in purely fuel costs, I’ve saved about two-thirds.

Of course, if you bear in mind that the new journey is only a tenth of the distance from home than SSE, you realise that the car is running considerably less efficiently than before, and this is reflected in the MPG figures that I got over the last three weeks. Usually, during the winter months with the winter blend diesel and colder temperatures the Golf does between 46 and 48 miles per gallon (it rises to between 48 and 50 miles per gallon in the summer), however over the past three weeks the Golf averaged 38 miles per gallon. It is worth bearing in mind when looking at that figure that it is still better than the Focus ever managed on the trips down to SSE, where it averaged around 34 miles per gallon…

Cars, MobLog

That Sinking Feeling…

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It was all going so well. Although I’d spent about twenty minutes sat in the queues in Wokingham to get across the level crossing, I’d had no problems retrieving the money I’d contributed to the SSE Sharesave scheme over the years from the branch of Halifax in town. Whilst it wasn’t anything like the amount that would have come back in shares based on the current price, it was still a nice sum.

Going back down towards the office, there was what looked like two muddy tracks on the road coming out of a building site, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I pulled into the car park, and then reversing into the space the steering felt a bit heavy. I got out to a really audible hissing noise, and the front wing of the car slowly sinking…

Space Saver Spare

Anyway, it was tipping down with rain, and since I didn’t much fancy struggling with the weedy little tools in the wet, and after the quick work they made of it last time, I took the easy way out and made use of my rarely used AA membership, and got a patrolman – complete with big beefy jack – to change over to the space-saver spare.

Thankfully, the patrolman appeared in what turned out to be one of the few dry periods in the afternoon. As before, he had a full sized trolley jack, and made quick work of getting the tyre off, the only point of difficulty being the traditional struggle to shift the machine tightened wheel nuts. When the AA man got the tyre off, we had a look around it to see where the hole was – and at first site, it seemed absolutely fine. After a closer look the AA man spotted a small split in the tread, but no sign of the cause. I had a quick look around the car park, but there was nothing obvious, so whatever had caused the puncture must have dropped off pretty quickly. Annoyingly it wasn’t a puncture in the old tyres on the back either, but in one of the two new tyres I bought just before Christmas – I’d got just three months use out of it! Anyway, I put in a call to Ridgeway and ordered in a replacement. Slightly amusingly, after forgetting to note down the tyre details before phoning them last time, I made sure I had all the tyre details, however I needn’t have bothered as Ridgeway had kept a note of them from last time! Hopefully with the relatively new tyre on the passenger side at the front, there won’t be an issue with uneven tyre wear. My experience with the first set of front tyres on the Golf is that the drivers side seemed to have worn a bit quicker than the passenger side anyway, possibly something to do with having most of the weight on that side of the car most of the time I guess. The new tyre will be in by tomorrow lunchtime, so I’ve been allowed to leave work early tomorrow afternoon to get it fitted. I guess I should be more careful of what is in mud on the road in future too!

Cars

Fixed Under Warranty

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The Volkswagen dealer fixed the problem with the indicator light under warranty today. When I collected the car at lunchtime (sadly not cleaned this time) the service assistant said that it was pretty unlikely to have been a bulb, but they had to let me know that it could be a chargeable item if it was. In this case they replaced the whole indicator module.

Now the only mystery to solve is quite how the radio keeps retuning itself to 210FM whenever the car goes in to the dealer. Do they have a deal with the radio station or something? 😉

General

Kwik-Fit Don’t Do This

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Clean Car

Taking a look at the front tyres on the Golf this week, I spotted that the tread was now right down to the tread wear indicator on one side, and fractionally above on the other. Since we are coming in to the worst part of what is expected to be the worst winter in years, I thought I’d better get them replaced.

The car was delivered with a set of Bridgestone B390’s, which unlike the Goodyear NCT5’s that were on the Focus when delivered (and incidentally the bottom of the range Golf), I was pretty happy with the performance (NCT 5’s have a reputation for poor wet weather performance – which I can back up from experience). However the Bridgestones proved somewhat difficult to find – even Bridgestone don’t list the tyre on their UK site. In the end I called Ridgeway, who said that they could supply a pair.

We then ran into a slight hitch in that their tyre fitter only works Monday to Friday – however after a couple of minutes they called back to say that their tyre fitter would come in especially on Saturday morning to fit the tyres for me, so this morning I drove into Reading to have them done.

However the nice surprise at the end was that having changed the tyres, they then had the car valeted – inside as well as outside. It is worth bearing in mind that what we’ve been used to with the local Ford dealer, is that they won’t valet the car at all on a weekend, so having them clean it fully when it was only in for a couple of tyres was great.