a long shot. old VW passat problem

Jul 09, 2012 6 Replies
T

A young friend of mine has an old 1.8L petrol Passat (about 8-10years old maybe), that intermittently flattens it's battery.



Sometimes when he locks the car, instead of a single flash from the indicators, they will carry on flashing for a while. He's been told that his car sometimes starts flashing for no reason whilst parked.



This would seem to be the cause of the drain but where would be the best place to start looking for the fault? Is this a common one? He's already replaced the flasher relay.



Tim


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C

VW did have a spate of hazard light switch failures about that time, IIRC. It's a bit of a needle in a haystack problem though.

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T

Yeah. I suspect water ingress somewhere and anticipate a frustrating and expensive search.

Tim

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M

According to Autodata they had a problem with water getting by the pollen filter housing and entering the central locking module. There was a modified seal available, but you could probably seal it with silicone or something. You could even disconnect the central locking fuse and see if the flat battery problem disappears. Water in the footwell would be a giveaway

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S

Ding! My friend had this. Passenger foot-well awash with water, CL not working, all sorts of odd lights coming on, windows opening, battery going flat. Cost a lot of money to sort out the heavily corroded wiring/connectors/ecu. Dave

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A

Ran across this website some time back,

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T

Thanks for all the feedback folks. He has reported back that he does indeed have a water ingress problem. I've forwarded all the info and web links.

Tim

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