I am having the following electrical problems with my Octavia 1.9tdi Elegance -

1) the rear wash/wipe only works when it wants to.

2) the rear brakelights come on when the car is left overnight.

3) when the brake lights come on overnight, sometimes they go off when the brake pedal is pressed, but sometimes they don't and even removing both of the fuses for the lights doesn't extinguish them

4) there is a current leakage of 0.75Amp from the battery even when all the lights and electrics are not running.

On several trips to the dealer, the diagnostics have not reported any problems. The car had been booked in for an overnight stay, but while waiting for my slot with a loan car to come around, the battery, which is itself a replacement for the original, has been trashed.

The car has now been delivered to the dealer by the AA and I am without a car, so any ideas that would lead to a quick resolution would be appreciated.

It's a bit late in the day on a saturday at the moment but I would consider phoning Customer Services and telling them that you intend to hire a car until such times as the problem can be rectified or they get you a car of equal or better standard and you will furnish them with the bill.

Although on reflection and just reading back over your other post, 8 weeks old - **** it, drop the keys off and tell them you'll be in for the refund on Monday. Obviously you would need to back this up with a well written letter and the large amount of AA call out paperwork.

Quite possibly water ingress into the E-Box under the bonnet or the central electrics ECU is playing up.

I have had a 2.0 TDi Octavia 2 with

Washers inop

Rear Wiper inop

Seat heating inop

These were intermittant faults which come and go. Replaced the above parts and it seems to have sorted it (fingers crossed).

Also have had brake light switches play about on the new Octavia.

Fortunatley I have not suffered anything like this but I had a brake light bulb go last week.

Came up on the display and informed me which is very nice.

Normally I would just get a bulb and replace it but as I was away from home and a dealer down the road I popped in and they did it for me.

Got talking tot the service guy and he says this is special bulb so I probably wouldnt have been able to get one anyway. Apparently all to do with the Canbus system.

He reckons that modern cars will end up being scrapped because of electrical problems, not bodywork or mechanicals as these are now generally so reialble that they relatively rarely give problems.

However if the ECU goes on a 8/10year old car it could well cost more to repair than the value of the car.

I dont think they are special bulbs. They are lit differently not due to can bus but due to voltage supplied to the bulb. Instead of using a 5w21w bulb for a sidelight/brake light they use a 21w bulb and duty cycle the voltage to it. So @ around 20% cycle or whatever a 21w bulb glows like a 5w.

OK Lummox understood.

Ill check the handbook to see what the bulb is.

Is there some point to this complication?

No point just a bit of useless information..lol

The bulb may well have an offset pin though.

Update:

The towbar electrics have been discounted as the source of the problem. They were rewired yesterday so that the control box only activated with the ignition switch. Despite that, the brake lights still came on last night, wouldn't go off this morning and the battery was dead.

When the AA man followed me to the dealer this morning, he noted that everytime I went round a right hand bend the brake lights flickered. So, car is back at the dealers - faulty pedal switch, faulty ECU/cruise control, dodgey wiring in the steering wheel column are the latest guesses.

Just to finish this off - the fault was traced to the brake pedal switch.

All OK now.

good to hear its sorted, had a faulty switch on my 2001 octavia. took ages to work out why my battery kept dying

Had the brake light switch fault on my O2 the Odd thing is that you do not need the key switch on for the lights to come on. Dealer put a new one in and all is now OK.

John