Me and a friend of mine with a brand new Octavia 1.6 TDI CR activated the cornering lamps with VCDS yesterday. He drove away with the car. Everything fine so far.

When he parked at home he noticed that the right turn lamp bulb where lighted up after he had shut down the car. The bulb have been glowing the whole night. He went to a Skoda dealer today, they say Cent. Elect. (J519) is broken... Can this be? Anyone heard about anything like this?

We have never heard of VCDS causing an electronic module to fail. All VCDS does is allow the user to modify the standard options available in the modules. The changes that VCDS can make are the same changes the factory tool can make.

You can destroy a module using one of the tools out there that modifies the memory of the module. VCDS cannot reprogram/flash a module.

Exactly what did you do. What steps did you take using VCDS? What version VCDS? Are you using an illegal copy? Did you get your interface from Ross-Tech or one of our authorized distributors? A hardware problem with a cheap wire could toast a module. Not many reports of that but there have been some rumors. Of coarse, people do not want to say they have the illegal product and then it toasted their control module.

Ofcourse is my cable Genuine Ross-Tech Dual-K&Can Serial ***Removed*** Rev.B

We did activate the Cornering lights and removed the seat belt clime. Thats it!

Edited 2 September, 200916 yr by VRStu

oh my god , i was going to activate the cornering fog for my 2009 face lift octavia tomorow using vag-com

i am now totally afraid now of doing so , specially that my car is out of warranty

any idea what can be the reason for this failure !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Exactly what did you do. What steps did you take using VCDS? What version VCDS?.

Please answer these questions. To my knowledge, we have never heard of a case where one of our VCDS interfaces led to a failed module. We need more information to understand and it would really help to have an autoscan from the car.

I really doubt that the changes you made caused this module to fail. I hear what you are saying but it would be a first.

I will point this thread to the top tech guys at Ross-Tech but I know they are going to need more information from you.

I think this thread is mis-titled. VCDS did not kill this module. It's possible the module in question had some sort of fault to begin with, which wasn't evident until that feature was activated; or perhaps the module has some sort bug in its firmware; or that particular variant of this module was never intended to have that feature activated but they forgot to lock out the relevant bit to prevent activation, which could be considered a firmware bug in the module.

In any case, we can't address it in more detail without specifics: The exact part number of the module and exactly what was done to it. The CodingLog.txt file in the VCDS folder should have some of that info. A current scan of the module (or even the whole car) showing what (if) any fault codes exist would be good too.

-Uwe-

This kind of failure is not unusual and is almost certainly not caused by VCDS. I'm sure the Ross-Tech experts above will eventually conclude this after investigating.

You can't say something has been killed if it had not been activated before the failure, and even then failures can occur at any time.

If sometime is going to fail, then statistically it is most likely do so shortly after it is first used/activated/enabled/powered up or when it nears the end of its life. It's the same for disk drives, washing machines, car parts, ...

I've removed the interface serial number.

Whilst it will be good to hear the outcome of this here in the forum, I'd suggest that you contact RT directly and confirm your license details and then you'll get direct support from the guys there.

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If sometime is going to fail, then statistically it is most likely do so shortly after it is first used/activated/enabled/powered up or when it nears the end of its life. It's the same for disk drives, washing machines, car parts, ...

That is indeed very true. It's also why these extended warranties on such items that the retailers want us to take out at extra cost are nothing but a con. The first year is covered by the purchaser's statutory rights anyway, so you're paying for the years after that, where as rwbaldwin quite rightly says the chances of failure are extremely slim......