Yorkshiremidge

@nickrfrank The wiring diags indicate there is a ten way connector "on left in the luggage compartment". Makes sense as the (expensive) rear loom section a dealer would fit to sort this fault out isn't that long. Not gone looking yet - but I assume it might be hidden behind the side trim panel. I can confirm there is no slack in the cables as that is why they fail ☹️ Just jointing broken wires back together won't sort this properly. What I was planning to do was let in new sections of cable for each circuit such that the joints at each end are tucked inside the tailgate and C pillar, and only the new cable is going through the grommet.

@jtmattila Just a quick update. Got my console out last night and I can confirm my selector is 6C2 713 025 AA. i.e. your 6C1 713 025 AA would appear to be the left hand drive version of the same selector. I ran out of light so I'm going to have a go at fitting the switch kit this morning all being well.

It'll likely need more info - have sent you a message.

@Breezy_Pete My black cable isn't co-ax either - you can see the strands in my photo earlier in the post, where the insulation has pulled apart. The manual mentions panoramic roof aerial as well as heated rear window aerial so it could be either, and the only way I'll know for sure is a quick check in the tailgate at some stage to see if there is box in there. @spig212 Ours is March 2016, so fairly early (we don't have a brolly/holder 😪 ) Guess we won't know for sure but since my loom is bad enough to do something with, I'll probably know more when I have gone through each and every wire and cut new in. That's a job for another day though!

@Breezy_Pete Mine has a thick black wire too and I'm certain no-one has ever been in there before. I have the 2017 edition of the manual and there are seven diags of heated rear window wiring, but I have just noticed that all of them have an asterisk against them which equates to "models with no rear window aerial" so I'm wondering if ours and @spig212 have one so the wiring is a bit different. Our car has a panoramic roof so it certainly doesn't have a roof aerial.

@Ootohere Sorry if I wasn't clear, I meant when the car was being parked up and left, not when it is being worked on. As @super717 has said, normally, the central locking refuses to lock if the selector lever isn't in Park.

I'd say VAG cars are OK reliability wise but not as good as you'd hope/expect from German technology/underpinnings. It's usually the likes of Kia and the Japanese brands that take the top slots these days. But I think the Fabia is a good all round car with a relatively small number of known issues. Ours has two currently, and both have been the subject of postings over the last few days. >Tailgate nearside wiring loom >A problem with a switch on the DSG auto gearbox selector - an issue shared with a number of other VAG cars with the same gearbox. I don't know how your car was previously driven but the particularly low mileage on yours prompts me to add another. An indy told me when we were looking to buy ours that Fabias just being used as local runabouts (as they sometimes are) can suffer with issues with the (Mahle) Turbo. The wastegate pivot can corrode/stick due to condensation - requiring specialist repair. I suspect the 1.2 might be slightly more prone to this than the 1.0 as the latter will tend to be on boost more frequently in normal driving. If my other half is driving our 1.2, she's gentle enough with it to hardly ever have the turbo spool up (I make up for it when I'm driving it). The main reason we ended up sticking with a VAG car (the Fabia replaced an old Mk4 Golf, and our other car is an Audi) is wanting an auto narrows things down for us. I can't stand CVTs which rules out most Japanese brands, and even Kia have had some issues with their DCT gearbox. We did look at Swift (attracted by its reliability) but ruled it out mainly on size for us if I recall. We went for the Fabia over others for the following reasons: 1. The value for money/high spec/low road tax 2. The 1.2 turbo was surprisingly lively 3. The internal space for the class of car is good - and we needed something more than just a runaround 4. It has great all round visibility So if your Swift already ticks all the boxes for what you need, I can see you edging towards keeping that.

@Rheumy It won't leave anyone stranded. It's more an irritation with it popping up and bleeping. It is if/when the switch goes permanently open circuit as opposed to intermittent open, that there may be a couple of issues - namely that it may be possible to inadvertently leave the car out of Park when you shouldn't be able to on an auto, and that is a safety matter (and a recall issue in US and Canada as they have specific regs relating to roll-away). In the UK, the transmission lock on an auto isn't a specific MOT test item (because the gearbox isn't), nor is it a specific fail item - but if an MOT tester is sat with the error in front of them, it's likely it will at least be recorded as a safety related advisory. Whether they could find a code to fail it against, I couldn't say. A permanent switch fail will of course be visible to anyone looking to buy the car in the future too. The kit arrived last week (£72 inc tax and shipping by Special Delivery from AKS Tuning) and I've just done a YouTube video on the first step which is removing the centre arm rest (if fitted). I'm hoping to get the console out either tomorrow or Wednesday and I'll then know if the kit fits and works OK on the Fabia.

@spig212 I'm still puzzled about the documented wire colours though I have to say. The only black wire I can see in the diags is a 0.75 going into the wiper motor - and that might be the wire running alongside the broken red/grey on yours. If you look at mine, the same thinner black wire runs next to the green/white - but I also have a fairly hefty black wire too and I can't think that anything else in the tailgate would need anything that size other than the heating element.

Definately worth knowing, but if you've ever wondered why it is so difficult to get to those levers on autos, it's because the most likely cause of the box refusing to come out of Park is if your brake switch has failed, which means you don't have any brake lights and shouldn't be driving it. So it's really only for recovery/garage purposes.

Showing as 2.5. Note - this is ONE of the wiring permutations I mentioned for the heated screen so yours might not be quite the same colours, and this is the one with two earths.

For me, it was annoying to start with as it flashed up as an error and disappeared so quickly, you couldn't read it whilst driving so we didn't know what it was + it was accompanied by a distracting bleep. Less distracting now we know what it is - but given the root cause is well known, it's likely gonna keep doing it more and more until it goes fully open circuit. When you research this issue, in some areas (such as the US and Canada) it is a safety recall issue as follows: "Over time, a build-up of silicate on the shift lever micro switch contacts can result in an isolationlike layer that may be interpreted as an open micro switch. This open switch normally indicates that the shift lever is in “P” park position. If the build-up happens, it may be possible to remove the key from the ignition switch without the shift lever being in the “P” park position because the system is unable to recognize that the vehicle is not in “P” park. This makes the vehicle noncompliant with FMVSS and CMVSS 114; Theft protection and rollaway prevention. If the ignition key is removed without the shift lever being in "P" Park position, there is a risk that the vehicle may roll away, resulting in a crash that could injure people and damage property." Just in the last couple of months, we've had a couple of cars in our town roll down the same steep hill because the disk brakes have cooled/contracted - effectively releasing the handbrake and the owners obviously didn't leave the vehicles in gear. In the second case, the vehicle crashed through level crossing barriers at the bottom of the hill and ended up on the railway line. As auto drivers, we are a bit more protected because we have a transmission lock forced upon us. So this gives rise to two questions: Do we want a fault on our cars that in the future, might allow us to leave the car out of Park in error? Is a faulty transmission lock on an auto going to cause an MOT failure? I suspect it will because it is a safety feature.

Hi Nick - have a look at these two posts which answer your question on colour of wires and where they come from, and I suspect the root cause may be the same.

@saint1d You're welcome. Even if the issue has been intermittent, it's still a possible cable break - as the conductors can break internally within the insulation, and make contact again depending on cable position. I dunno if you have looked at the other post in the last hour or so but the OP on that one has just found his broken RED/GREY wire in the tailgate grommet as I suspected he would, and a second wire that is likely his heated screen - and the rest of his loom looks just as 💩 as mine does! So just warn your sister that if she does have the same issue, the auto electrician will probably recommend doing a full repair on the loom as I will be doing on ours.

I used a trim pry. You will see it has clips on the side that hold it into the bodywork. Normally, plain brown is always EARTH. There seems to be a bit of variation on the wiring to the heated screen element. Some are WHITE all the way from the control module to the element, some are BLACK/RED changing to WHITE in the luggage compartment, and some are BLACK/RED all the way to the element. Some wiring diags have two earths from the heated screen so I wonder if that is a bundle of those two earths OR whether the feed and the earth for the element are bundled together. You might need to strip it back a bit to see if you can see.

PS - not sure what "module" is being referred to at the rear of the car that the garage might have changed. The number plate light wire (RED and GREY in colour) comes off the "Onboard supply control unit" (J519) which is at the front of the car, and runs all the way into the tailgate - and then splits into two to feed the two number plate light units.

See my reply on this thread. Worth a quick check.

Ouch - that's some bill and sounds like it might have been a new instrument cluster? - so that is a VERY hard one for them to defend if that was the case. Blown light bulb, a corroded connector, or wire coming loose and rubbing against something - fair enough to exclude as normal wear and tear. But the reality is that even when you get something like a main Skoda dealer warranty, it isn't actually run/controlled by Skoda - it is run by an insurance company. If they can get out of paying a claim, they will, and to hell with the rights and wrongs of it, even if it affects Skoda's reputation. My local Skoda dealer (as distinct from the clowns we bought the car from) took photos and at least tried on my behalf to get the warranty provider to cover it, but they just refused - and the dealer admitted they had had cases before where they felt a customer claim was reasonable, only to have it knocked back. That being said, the warranty provider had to pick up the bill for one of the other defects our car had, so it wasn't all bad news. As an aside, our other car is a TT Mk2 and they are well known for burning out the earth pin on the rear light cluster connector as its just too small to handle the current from such a big and well lit light unit. Unquestionably a design fault from new that will affect every Mk2 sooner or later, but I bet many TT owners have had that one knocked back over the years. Thankfully, it's an easy fix - you just wire in your own earth.

@spig212 The first place to look on any issue affecting the tailgate electrics is the nearside tailgate grommet. It just clips in and pulls out, so you'll be able to spot any fault in there in just a few seconds without taking any panels off. The cabling is far too tight on mine and gets stretched when the boot is opened and is a fairly common failing judging by other reports I've seen on the net. The offside doesn't seem as bad as there are less wires going through that. I already have one broken wire - the blue/brown one in the attached photo that tells the body control unit that the boot is open. So my boot light doesn't work, and if I leave the tailgate open for more than around 40 seconds, the car self-locks (because it doesn't know the boot is open!) and then the alarm usually goes off as the ultrasonics pick up the air movement inside the car. Great when you're loading your shopping....... So it's on my list of jobs to do to graft in a whole new repair section of loom. If it it this fault you have and gets repaired at a dealer, you're probably looking at a bill of £400+ as the rear loom alone is around £130. You can actually get repair sections made by Febi if you're good with automotive crimpers, but the repair section isn't exactly cheap at around £45 + it comes with the grommet and if you wanted to keep that, you'd have to get the rear window wash tube through it. I'm hoping to do the repair in situ with standard automotive cable soldered and heat shrunk at each end. As you can see in the photo of mine, there is no point me just sorting one wire as all the rest are well on their way with the insulation being litterally stretched apart - and that doesn't happen with normal flexing faults. What really hacked me off about this was we bought the car from a main Skoda dealer with a Skoda warranty on it, and the fault was first experienced just a few days after we collected the car. The dealer refused to accept the fault was a pre-existing one in spite of being shown the photo and tried to claim it had broken over the proceeding few days and was just normal wear and tear (on a car with less than 35K miles on it at the time). Skoda UK refused to accept it was a known issue when the wires are like guitar strings. Skoda's warranty refused to pay out because it has an exclusion on wiring. I took my case to the mediation scheme the dealer was part of (run by the local Trading Standards) and the dealer still refused to offer any evidence that the fault wasn't pre-existing, so I'd have had to take the dealer down the small-claims track. I mulled it over and decided I could fix the fault myself faster and with less stress than taking them to court, and to be honest, given how they behaved and the two other defects that they had to admit were present, I wouldn't let them anywhere near a car of mine anyway. So even a shiny main dealer Skoda used car warranty is no protection against wiring issues, which was certainly an eye-opener.

I've dug the gaiter off mine again, photographed the selector (see attached - which looks identical to the one in the YouTube video I linked to earlier in this thread as far as I can see), and sent the photos to AKS Tuning who advise me that 5Q0713128A is correct for it, so I have ordered one just a few minutes ago. I'll document the arm rest and console removal when I try and fit it which will be some time next week, and @jtmattila I will confirm the part number on my selector so we can see if it's the same as yours.

I didn't look too closely - I was just looking for part numbers of selectors beginning 5Q0 and that was one example I found. @jtmattila There is another step you can take since you know your selector part number. It looks like a German company ecu.eu offer a repair service on selectors 6C1713025AA for this fault so it might be worth you enquiring what that involves - fitting the switch kit to them, or replacing the failed switch. It lists this as being applicable to 1.0 (engine code CHZC) and 1.2 TSI Fabias (engine code CJZD). Ours is a 1.2 TSI with a CJZD engine. They list some other selectors for other Fabia engines too: 6C1713025AB 1.4TDI Combi @logiclee What engine/code is in yours out of curiosity?

I've just done a check and the Skoda Octavia selector for years 2014-2017 (as per the LLL Parts fitment) seems to be part ref. such as 5Q0711061 as an example, which would seem to support your source. But if people have fitted these to Fabias (or had them fitted) and the fitment/compatibility isn't documented, then there is a possibility the source might be wrong. I can't identify the likely part number for mine off the net so what I'll do is get my console out some time over the next few days and see if I can get the part number off mine, and I'll run it past AKS Tuning and see what they say OR run it past the VAG indy I use.

Thanks @logiclee - I'm gonna get in touch with AKS Tuning and see if they can confirm the position. @jtmattila that just leaves the question of where you got your info that it might not fit the selector with the part number you gave. It doesn't seem likely there is going to be much variation in selectors within the Mk3 range.

Just found this on YouTube that suggests one of the switch kits might well fit the Fabia, eventhough I found a listing on LLL Parts for the kit which mentions the Octavia as the only Skoda in the fitment table. https://www.lllparts.co.uk/product/5q0713128a/micro-switch-5q0713128a It would be good to corroborate this with your experience @logiclee - the comment that the console does need to come out probably ties in with the bill you got too.

That's interesting - do you know from your invoice what they actually did? i.e. did they fit one of these extra switch kits on top of the selector that bypasses the original defective switch OR did they replace the existing defective switch somehow? £200 doesn't sound that bad actually - I bet a new selector is several times that!