J.R.

Getting a replacement key from a main dealer is expensive but it is a new and not cloned key, the old ones RF chip is deleted from the ECU so it can't start the car, it will of course open the drivers door, I don't know but would say its a reasonable assumption that VAG having gone that far then the key would no longer work the remote central locking. A cheaper cloned key from Ebay or a vehicle locksmith will not disable the lost key. I hope when you put your appeal on Facebook you did not say what make or model your vehicle was or give any clues to where you live.

Thats what he was doing when I found him grovelling around on the wet driveway yesterday.

Thanks Pikpilot, I was sure I had read somewhere about the bulbs being slightly different, I will research the PY21W. Normally you cant fit std bayonet bulbs in an offset fitting, he didn't say that he had to force them in, perhaps the offset is lengthwise pushing them properly onto the contact?

Thankyou to everyone for your contributions 👍

Planting the throttle is not working hard 😆 I have to disconnect my Haldex controller to spin my wheels, even that is easier than trying to get a wheelspin out of the asthmatic Vivas, Escorts, Minis etc that I always tried so desperately to. Back then my pal let me into the closely guarded secret of how to do a burnout by abuse and not through power, it had to be a RWD car of at least 1600cc with rear drum brakes front discs, preferably the rears not working very well. You had to do a heel n toe emergency stop from about 15mph in second gear, stand the car on its nose while declutched and the throttle on the floor, when the engine hit max RPM you would keep the throttle on the floor, sidestep the clutch with your left foot, the weight transfer would allow the rear tyres to spin up and hopefully glaze the rear shoes the car creeping slowly forward against the brake pressure. If the stars were aligned you could then push harder on the brakes with the left foot or toe of the right foot to stop the vehicle the rear tyres by then having lost most of their grip continued spinning creating a smokescreen. When you got fed up it was really hard to drive away again it was like driving on ice. Drifting a car is easy once you have got it started and the tyres have lost their grip. A 1600 MK2 Tincorner with front disc brakes and shagged rears (like most were!) was very good for weight transfer burnouts.

What law is that and what are the penalties please?

Thanks, it's frustrating as I am itching to go out and find out what the problem was. Why the 90° bend in the wire, do you have to rotate it when in position or is it just to give you something to push against?

Either they have fitted a cheaper lower level clockspring that does not support the cruise & MFD functions or they have fitted the correct revision and not coded it or coded it incorrectly. Take it to someone with VCDS and they can find what module is fitted and its coding, the correct part numbers for the high line functions are listed on the RossTech help pages. I have MFD but would like cruise control, the clockspring fitted to my vehicle will not support it, I will have to buy the high line one and code it correctly for the functions as well as fitting the cruise control stalk.

Well that was embarassing 😳 The lower grille end caps whilst clearly seperate mouldings would not detach no matter how hard I pulled on them, as it was not my car and he was freaking out by then I stopped. His is a 2012 MK2 facelift Combi, looked just like the grille in the video. I'm sure the LH one has to be removed to fit the towing eye, that was just as resistant, they really felt like something would break.

I have stopped breathing and didn't die, had I continued for longer I would have, I would not advocate to others that if they stop breathing nothing untoward would happen. I did explain in detail what could/would happen once the battery fails and why I recommend it be disconnected.

Aside from nobody has arms 4 foot long to remove the wheel caps does it actually matter if you cannot visually make out the locking bolt cap from the others? They are all removed with the same tool. I am partially sighted and do a lot of work by feel, I can see the difference between the caps on the vehicle but I never even try to differentiate them, I whip all the caps off in a fraction of a second using the C clip tool without even looking, one of them will resist, I have to force the tool into place, that is the locking cap not that I care, it gets chucked in the alu chicken packaging tray with the other caps & bolts. Once the caps are off its clear which wheel bolt is the locking one where you need the adaptor, if they all looked similar at that point I could understand the angst.

Frustration pushed me into a road rage incident on the autoroute from Calais, a Range Rover model that all the influencers seem to pose in front of (dont know the model as I have no interest) had driven around the Calais rocade on the left overtaking lane for a mile slowly holding up the traffic then shot off well beyond the 90kph limit, I caught him up on the autoroute where he was driving at 110kph, the roads are almost empty at that time of night, i passed him and noticed he dipped his main beam as I passed, a courtesy I actually was not expecting. When I got say 300m ahead on went his main beams which were dazzling me despite the distance between us, it was a straight road & he did not need main beam, I put on my rear fog lights and his lights dipped immediately, too fast in fact but I had not worked out why, within a minute they were back on again so I again put on my rear fog light, same result, this continued a dozen times before i lost my rag and slowed right down, let him pass me and then I sat up his chuff for 10 minutes with my headlights on main beam 👍 He accelerated away and it was then I noticed that his beam pattern was changing when there were oncoming vehicles on the other carriageway and realised that like so many modern drivers he had abdicated his control of the vehicle allowing the (not) smart system to dip his headlights, when I got more than a certain distance from him the sensor must no longer have registered my rear lights as a vehicle, the last time when I braked to give him the business the lights also dipped immediately.

Indeed but you wrote that the internal battery is a service item, I corrected that to say the whole unit has to be replaced; I also corrected your assertion that there should not be any adverse effects by leaving it connected and non functional.

I'm not sure how I am going to break this to him 😳 He usually removes the wheel & the arch liner, he has only just worked out that by struggling he does not need to remove the wheel. He has 3 bulbs left out of a pack of 10 so has changed 7 bulbs & now I can see that he could have easily removed the bulbholder and sprung the contact, he will have been frightened of the connector, he has seen me break a few in my time, we are opposite ends of the spectrum! I will have to go out in the dead of night to remove and repair the bulbholders without him knowing!

Techniques like that are well beyond the teaching for the driving test. It was more a case of unlearning something that you may have been taught or may have found out yourself through experimentation or the hard way through accident, with a standard braking system swerving whilst doing a full on emergency stop would usually result in a total loss of control and a spin, experienced drivers would cadence brake which would allow some limited steering response but still likely to spin, basically you would anchor up, maintain the same trajectory and if it was clear you were not going to be able to stop before hitting the object/vehicle let off the brakes and swerve (probably spin) at the very last instance. Someone who has only ever known ABS will probably have adapted to steering while emergency braking or at the least wont have been told not to do both. The surging forward on ice during an ABS stop if not declutched is unnerving the first time it happens and only really a problem with powerfull engines as they pour on the coals to prevent the engine stalling. My XR4x4 Sierra would plow on for ever with my foot pressed as hard as I could on the brake on snow or ice, declutch and it stopped immediately. It's very hard to unlearn automatic responses, it takes practice and that what I did lots of in 1987 with my first ABS equipped vehicle, in later years I had my road (ABS) responses and my racetrack (no ABS, no stability systems) responses.

To paraphrase Wino. - Grow up!

🤣🤣🤣

I was referring to your penchant for writing "as the computers often get themselves mixed up and need rebooting" and similar, not your liking of an idea.

Yes, partially at least, but it's dangerous to make it engage as you have to grip one front wheel to stop it turning, I dont advise it. Been there done that got the scars.

Yes I had a pre FL and it was as you say, he was so impressed with it that he bought an identical later FL model, same colour and everything. It doesn't look like it can be removed from the front but if I had bent down and started prodding and pulling (which is the only way with these vehicles) he would have freaked out, he is a very special person (I love him dearly though) and needs handling with care.

Tell her if the ABS engages in snow or ice conditions and it does not seem the car is slowing down or rapidly enough (seems to be surging between applications) she must declutch straight away. It's counter-intuitive for someone who has been driving a long time without ABS. Something else to learn for any emergency stop to avoid an obstacle is to steer around it while hard on the brakes and declutched, once again very very counter-intuitive but the real value of an ABS system is the ability to have maximum braking effort and be able to steer around or evade an obstacle. This skill is best practiced in an empty snowy car park.

Thats the funniest thing I have read on a forum for a very long time 🤣

Nothing needs to be done in respect of the radio code, it will remain, when people think it hasn't they are being impatient, ignore any message and the radio will come to life on its own. I know that you write this several times a day but that does not make it any truer. How do you propose to "reboot" all the other computers that you believe the vehicle has whilst "saving" the radio?

Good man. Stuff like that always gets you out of trouble one day or another often for something completely unrelated. The challenge is remembering that you have the tool and also where it is stored. The latter a big problem for me these days, stuff spread across 2 properties in different countries and a lot now in storage boxes in one of 3 box trailers in 2 different locations or stored in my friends cellar. It will be so good to have everything together and organised when I move to the next place.

My neighbour is frequently having to replace the halogen bulbs in his DRL's, they are the ones under the bumper and are in the same housing as the fog lamps. I'm sure that I recall someone saying that they were special bulbs that are very similar to standard ones but fitting standard bulbs will result in the frequent failures that my neighbour is suffering. The ones he is using are standard P21 filament bulbs, he is sure they are the correct ones because he got them from Eurocarparts, that says to me he has a less than 1 in 10 chance of them being correct 😆 He says they are failing because the contact is being worn away through vibration & he won't let me remove the lamp unit to tweak the contacts claiming the whole bumper has to be removed, is that BS? It doesn't phase me to remove it but he is a highly strung panicker and worrier. I don't like to see him grovelling around under the wheelarch so often when I'm sure there is a definitive fix for the problem.