If anyone is familiar with Megane electrics and likes a challenge - please read on and give some advice! My car is a 53plate Megane2 SportTourer 1.9Dci Was driving home the other evening and a few glitches happened. First, the power steering died - just momentarily but quite alarming when negotiating a roundabout! It did the same thing again a couple of minutes later -no error messages or any clue as to what happened. What the hell was going on?
30 seconds later the car was misfiring and the console now reported 'Injector Fault'. I pulled over, and the engine just died. Instead of the usual "remove card" or "press clutch or brake" message, the console went completely blank, then started flashing weakly and randomly. I removed and reinserted the keycard but the display remained stubbornly blank. The only thing working normally was the flashing alarm light.I was unable to start the car, or put on the hazzard lights, or even switch on the interior light. All the electrics had apparently died apart from the alarm - I assumed that the alarm might have its own backup battery, so perhaps the main battery had died? A loose cable? A bad earth?
The AA man arrived. He assumed it was a bad battery or bad earth, but basic checks showed no problem, even though he couldn't start the car. And the battery has been absolutely fine - no problems prior to now at all. He attached a battery booster pack and suddenly the car was back to normal. But it was still fine once he removed the booster pack. At that point he gave up and offered to escort me home. The journey home was fine. My AA paperwork advises "no fault found - recommend taking car to garage."
I've since taken the car to a garage, some 10 miles away - again, no problem. The garage isn't a renault dealer, but is a renault specialist
- and someone I trust with my life- but they found no fault at all!
So - any ideas? So surely there's a cable fault somewhere - probably a break inside the insulation of a large cable that returns from the fusebox to the battery, or some similar main artery in the car's electrical system. Or could this be something related to the strange computerised electrics that cars rely on these days? If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please let me know!
One possible clue - I've heard that water can get into a fusebox behind one of the headlights and cause problems, but Renault havea a sealing kit available. I haven't yet taken the car back to Renault to investigate this possibility, as the car is now out of warranty -but that's my next option.
I like the Renault - it's a lot of car for the money, but I do miss the reliability of the 11 year-old Honda it replaced!