Hi, all,
I've got a 2000 Passat 4-motion with just 31k miles. On a recent road trip, while going about 70MPH on the highway, something in the dashboard shorted, and I was greeted with a nice puff of smoke in the face! Needless to say, this scared the crap out of me. I pulled over, and noticed that the fuel and temperature gauges were both off. Everything else seemed to work fine.
I brought the car in to a local mechanic, who said he could see where there were some burnt wires in the dash. He also had a spare instrument cluster unit from another Passat, which when plugged in, worked fine. His solution was to replace the cluster unit, costing around $600. I didn't like this solution because I wanted to know what actually caused the short, and was it just going to happen again? Swapping out the instrument cluster also would change the odometer reading, and would require one of those odomoter change stickers. I'm guessing that's not great for resale value.
So I decided to wheel it on in to the dealer and have them trace the short. They've spent 3 hours investigating so far, and they say they'll probably need another 2 at least. This Chicago dealer's labor rates are $108/hr, so this is going to add up to a nice bundle.
Since this model/year has a lousy 2-year/24kmi warranty, I'm going to end up paying for this out of pocket. My question is:
- Is there a good argument I can use with VW America to try to get them to help pay for this? A serious electrical short and smoke from the dash should not be happening at 31k miles. This particular issue doesn't seem to be common among this model.
- How would you have handled this?
Thanks,
Martin