Has anyone experienced their front assist coming on for no reason and locking the steering wheel? 

I was driving recently at between 50-60mph on an open road when suddenly my front assist started bleeping and wouldn't stop. Worse than that, it completely locked my steering wheel.  I came to a round about and put my hazards on and turned the car off.  I turned it back on and started to go but the steering wheel was still locked.  With a lot of effort and all my strength I managed to turn the wheel enough to get off the roundabout.  I managed to find somewhere safe to stop and again turned the car off and removed my keys.  This seemed to work and I could move the steering wheel again.

Safe to say I turned front assist off following this as I did not want it to happen again.

I understand that a number of VW cars had this same issue and it caused a lot of accidents.  I will be reporting it to Skoda today, but first wanted to see if anyone else has experienced similar!

Thanks! 

Hello, welcome to the forum.

From your description, the steering did not actually lock - it sounds that what you experienced was loss of power steering assistance. Front assist only operates the brakes and is not connected to the steering. 

Is your gearbox DSG? Was your engine still running when you lost steering assistance - or had it stalled? When this happened, did you find that you had to press the brake pedal really hard too?   

Edited 18 June, 20241 yr by Warrior193
added information

Are you sure it's not the bloody annoying lane "assist" in part?

 

My wife told me front "assist" on my wife's 2015 Fabia has come up to say it wasn't active I guess that was leaf or debris at front grill area or computer programming lapse or computer brain-fart.  Another time whilst she was driving slow through town traffic by herself sudden car panic and car jumps on brakes for no apparent reason, then my wife sees a bag blowing in the road, - ya gotta luv these computer driving "aids".

 

In 2020(?) there was a computer chip shortage for car manufacturers and assembly problems who know what went in and with cars in those periods.

 

As has been said loss of power steering will make the steering seem heavy but it should still steer, if you've only ever driven cars with power steering then it will seem even heavier than to those that lived before PAS was the norm.

 

4 hours ago, Rachaellh said:

I understand that a number of VW cars had this same issue and it caused a lot of accidents.  I will be reporting it to Skoda today, but first wanted to see if anyone else has experienced similar!

I'm sure some of the member here might have heard of this.  Good luck with VWSkoda, they are very, very, very reluctant to accept or admit to much.  You could look and see if their are any, admitted to, Recalls or VWSkoda in-house technical sheets to excuse the behaviour, if it was a Telsla it'd be 100% driver error, not that VW are much better.

 

"Škoda Recall Campaigns" - https://www.skoda-auto.com/services/recall-campaigns

 

@Rachaellh Is your Fabia DSG (automatic) ? Are you able to say if the engine had stalled before you lost power steering assistance?