My wife had a scary thing happen in our 2002 Passat this week...
She returned to the locked car with our 3-year-old son and unlocked all doors with the remote (two pushes on the unlock button). She opened the rear passenger side door and put our son in his car seat, leaving that door open. She then opened the front passenger side door, leaned in, inserted the ignition key and turned on the engine. She did this so she could turn the air conditioner on while she was buckling our son in his carseat (it was a hot day). Then she closed the front passenger side door and went back to our son to finish buckling him in. After he was in place, she closed his door. At this point, all of the doors on the car locked automatically!
After a few moments of panic and trying to get AAA using a friends cell phone, she managed to get our son to open the door.
To confirm what had happened, she rolled down the front passenger side window and repeated the process to make sure she wasn't dreaming. Sure enough, when she closed the rear passenger side door again, all the doors locked.
We looked in the manual for any mention of this "feature" and only found the auto-locking of doors when you get up to 10mph - this feature *is* enabled on our Passat.
Can anyone enlighten me as to the purpose of this behavior? Seems like a "feature" that is geared to locking you out of your car. I can't figure any useful reason for this.
-- TRW _______________________________________ My e-mail: t r w 7 @ i x . n e t c o m . c o m _______________________________________