Dad has recently had some major issues with his Skoda. Came in the form of multiple errors flagging upon hitting the ignition.

 

After 3 hours of diagnosis, it was determined to be a ECU fault by the Skoda dealership and after a very costly repair (somewhere in the region of £1500) the ECU was replaced.

 

The very next day the faults came back however and now it has been further diagnosed by the dealership. They now believe it to be a break in the wiring loom, for which they have quoted us ~£5000 to replace.

 

I want to believe this is an accurate quote but worried my dad might be getting hoodwinked.

Suggest you go to a competent auto electrician.  Seems the dealer is just guessing and throwing YOUR money at the problem.

Edited 18 January, 20233 yr by ords

Welcome.

 

What are the Dealership doing about the ECU that was not required if it was not required? 

 

Where are you in the UK?    Surely you would not have that Dealership involved in the repair.

 

?

Did they take in excess of £300 for the diagnosis?     Refund due there i suspect. 

I'm in Lancashire. They may have covered themselves with the ECU as my dad at the time made a point of saying well what if you replace the ECU and it doesn't fix it, their response was just we will come to some arrangement.

 

They have come back to him today saying that they will instead of replacing the wiring loom they will bypass what they believe to be the affected wire. All sounds very fishy to me.

@skodaskod1

Do they think mice have been at the wiring? 

 

Maybe they need an Area Warranty Manager to arrange a Skoda Engineer to inspect the 5 year old car and see if this is a unique fault.

51 minutes ago, toot said:

@skodaskod1

Do they think mice have been at the wiring? 

 

Maybe they need an Area Warranty Manager to arrange a Skoda Engineer to inspect the 5 year old car and see if this is a unique fault.

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I think that's their belief, yes. My worry is if they once again "fix" it, this time by bypassing the affected wire, and it still has a fault not sure where we would stand in getting a refund. Also means he'd still be without a car.

Seen this type of spurious fault many times on different vehicles (HGVs), usually down to a module gone wrong, causes noise on the CAN network, which then messes everything else up. Gives the impression of multiple faults, in effect its only one fault, but hard to find. 

In my experience, ECUs are very rarely faulty, when they are there's nearly always evidence of water ingress. 

Only way to trace this kind of fault is to unplug each non-critical module one at a time, until the fault goes. 

This can only be done while the fault is 'live', it's a nightmare when it's an intermittent fault. 

 

Replacing a wiring loom or ECU should be an absolute last resort in my opinion. 

Well this sounds like an absolute mess and gives us experienced and honest mechanics a terrible name!!!

 

I very much hope you are not paying for an ecu! Not a penny.

 

if you’re anywhere near north London I’d be happy to take a look for you.

 

this is what it comes to when technicians are in the dealer network and some are only capable of replacing parts or following computer controlled fault finding, no ability to scope can networks, find spurious signals or trace a fault.

 

if they thought there was a dodgy wire they could have temporarily ran an external wire for this to see if the fault returns over a week to disprove/prove their theory.

and since when do you replace a loom for a broken wire??? Repair it to a Skoda approved standard! 
sounds more like they have no idea what they are doing.

Or they have every idea of how to fleece an unwary customer