Same thing happened to my 1997 Jetta when I tried to jam a fertilizer spreader in the trunk and slam the door shut to get it to close. I ended up busting the mechanism. I had the latch replaced. I was told that there is this little piston that "shoots" out from the motor to release the latch. My jamming the door either through that piston out of whack or damaged the latch. Did you do something similar?
Anyway, everthing works fine now. But to get the thing open, you will have to drop the back seats and crawl into the trunk that way. My problem was that I still had the stupid spreader in the trunk and it was too big to pull out through the back seats. So I had disassemble the thing and pull it out piece by piece. Brutal.
Fortunately the only place I spread fertilizer is at work. They tell me that I spread it around pretty good.
Saturday the seat comes out, and I hope to find either a broken latch mechanism, or a bad vacum actuator. Burn some fertilizer for me.
Thanks to all those who posted followups.
(conman, eh? fertilizer. eh? I think so ;-) )
I had the same thing happen to my 2000 Jetta. I had to crawl into the trunk from the inside and push the latch with a screwdriver at the same time I was pushing the trunk button on my key. I had to remove the fuzzy carpet thing on the trunk lid to get to the latch. That was probably a year ago and it hasn't gotten stuck again since.
I have the rear seat out, but can't get into the trunk. There ia a solid, welded in place panel all the way across the back with only a cutout for the ski pass through. If most Passats don't have the solid panel, it may be that mine does because of the rear differential on this 4Motion.
Ideas?
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