Hi there, help needed! I have a Skoda Fabia 1.4 (8v), Y reg, with a very peculiar electrical problem. Every time I switch the wipers on in intermittent mode, the car starts juddering, as though the engine is about to cut out. However, the other wiper cycles seem to work fine. I asked a couple of garages to investigate the issue, but they said that they couldn’t find any fault. I would be grateful for any advice you might have. Many thanks, Marius.

A lot of the electrics on the Fabia use CANBUS rather than traditional looms for sending signals back and forth. I don't know if this applies to the wipers, but if so, maybe there's something up with the switch on the stalk that's sending duff signals somewhere??? A new stalk would fix it, but it's quite a difficult job. You may want to check if it does it on all the intermittent speeds (using the little switch on top of the stalk), and if not, just avoid using the setting that gives you problems!

Some of the early automatics had a problem whereby the engine would cut out when the wipers were on intermittent. It turned out that the ECU was picking up an elctrical interference pulse from the wiper circuit. Dealers were instructed to replace the ECUs on cars that had this fault, presumably the new ECUs had a diode in them to stop the pulse getting to them.

You could try re-routing the wiring loom, ensuring that the wiper motor wires are not too close to the main loom.

Thanks a lot for your advice, it’s good to know that this is a somewhat known problem (although my Skoda garage pretended that they couldn’t find anything wrong when asked to investigate the issue…). How much does it cost to replace the ECU? I guess it’s expensive.