I'm having some very strange problems with my j reg ford escort. It refused to start one morning so i jump started the car with a spare battery i have. It ran fine until i turned the engine off then it refused to start again. I thought it was the battery knackered so i bought a new one from Halfords. The problems have still persisted though. There is now no problem starting the car but it will stall and refuse to start after a few miles and not turn over again for about 30 mins then will turn over fine but stall a few miles later. The problem seems to be worse in the evening when i have to turn my lights on.
Is this the alternator playing up and not charging my battery? could it be dodgy wiring maybe a short of some kind? anything else i may have overlooked.
The message from "Vim Fuego" contains these words:
Nope - it's a VW Touran and I don't know how it does it, I haven't looked. If I were doing it (if I couldn't avoid it!) I'd use an epicyclic gearbox with a solenoid.
Well, it definitely uses an electrical solenoid, and gearbox. It's not epycyclic though.
The electrical setup on the V10 TDI Touareg is even more amazing, with multiple batteries and a complex set of logic determining what gets used for starting, which one gets charged first. The alternator is rated at 190 Amps continuous, 300 Amps short term!
Maybe, but my simplistic way of looking at it is this; vehicles have become much more reliable and their potential longevity has increased. This reduces income for both the manufacturers and the dealers.
By offering ever-increasing "features", whether desirable or not, a new vehicle becomes more attractive to Joe Public. By making them ever more complex they require more time at the dealership to fix, and become less practical to run as an old banger.
Obviously this is all bad news for the majority of subscribers to this NG, but the general public like to have more and more "bragging ability" about their cars.
Also, as new cars are all pretty much multiplexed now, adding lots of features is usually a case of a simple software change. As the I/O is all available to the ECU the only limit is what the designer can dream up. Once implemented, it costs the manufacturer nothing!
Two examples from the Golf 5::
It puts its heating/ventilating on to recirculation when you select reverse to stop your own exhaust fumes entering the cabin.
Because the wipers park below the bonnet line it is difficult to access them for cleaning or replacement. A combination of opening the driver's door and operating the wiper switch with the ignition off brings the wipers up vertically on the screen for easy access.
Both these things seem neat to the average owner, yet are provided simply by software.
In the longer term it will make car ownership at the DIY level much more of a challenge, which is obviously what manufacturers and dealers want.
When I first ran 10 year old bangers I remeber regularly having to wled them together again , replace cams & rebuild cylinder heads, swear at carburettors etc. all the ones I've had of late have required similar lengths of time to fix, but far less frequently.
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