Hi,

I am having some issues with my Girlfriends 2000Skoda Fabia 1.4.

Firstly the power steering light would occasionally come on when starting the car, if you turned it off and back on again several times light went out and power steering worked fine. Did some research and found that replacing the battery might do the trick so I did this. And it did fix the problem, happy days.

BUT about 3 journeys later light came back on, while it was in garage being valued for part ex (Sods law). Wouldn't go off so drove it home without power steering. ON way home airbag warning light started flickering and then came on constant, as I was only about 2 miles from home thought I would take a chance and carry on. whilst doing this the engine management light came on constantly and the internal indicator lights ( the ones in the car in the dashboard) stopped working and being intermittent whilst the ones on the outside the car were working fine.

I am stumped and without taking it to a dealer to get a fault code have no idea what it could be, not worth doing that as car isn't worth much .

Any help would be awesome.

Thanks

I wonder if there could be an issue with the voltage regulator. If you have a multimeter, with the engine running test the voltage from the positive battery terminal and put the negative probe against the engine block. Next turn everything on (in particular headlights, heated rear screen, blowers on full) and check again. Can't remember the exact figure which is desirable but you should be somewhere around the 14v mark. The voltage should be reasonably comparable in both measurements.

Edited 19 October, 201213 yr by anewman

That could possibly be your battery not charging. I had this incident in the works van and i **** myself, was driving through radcliffe a few months ago when it got flooded, had no choice but to drive through HUGE puddles, anyway.

Carried on driving, radio went off... Strange... airbag light came on, started to worry then, other things like ABS started showing on the dashboard, i arrived at my place where i was delivering and decided to turn the engine off. Wouldnt start... Had to get jump started. Anyway going down the motorway the hazard lights started to come on randomly after a while i decided to pull into the hard shoulder, soon as i pulled into the hard shoulder the engine cut out, luckily enough i was going slow enough to apply the handbrake.

Called the AA out and it turned out the Alternator wasnt charging my battery (me thinking it was the puddles). Apparently the computer tries to cut out all the little things to try save as much power as possible.

As said -I'd say first cheap step. From my aged memory voltage shoulld be more like 13.8. Looking at Maplin ,there as low as £8, or an autoranging one ( more robust if you're not used to setting ranges )from around £16.

Alternatively, if you've got AA/RAC cover - get it to do it in a car prk and call them out.

Edited 19 October, 201213 yr by VWD

The battery could be old..........or it could be the standard PAS sensor fault..........(new better sensor from skoda required)................those fault codes need to read and then cleared tho'...