Peter / Jeff
I left the battery disconnected (as usual..) during the icy / snowy weather last month - couldn’t use the car for the best part of a week - then found the
problem seemed to have resolved itself when I reconnected…!
Relating this to a pilot friend, he told me that they use freezing to reset the 'firmware' in certain aircraft systems when needed. This is sort of hard-wired software in the micro-chips. Quite how this cures it, I don’t know, but it seems to be okay now.
I was just thinking the other day I would come back and report on this site, but I didn’t want to count my chickens too soon..! Still, fingers crossed, seems to work now okay.
The depressing thing is that I took the car to a Seat ‘specialist’ in November, who charged me £90 to diagnose that it needed a new ‘dashboard insert’ for £500! I had my doubts and subsequently tried cleaning up the earth connections under the battery (there are several), which I found suggested somewhere online. This seemed to work for a day or so, which just coincided with me getting a ‘quality assurance’ questionnaire from Seat. As you can imagine, I gave them a piece of my mind… As you might expect, I heard nothing in response….
As for the solution, it may be the fact that I had left it idle for many days in sub-zero conditions that did the trick for me, when it seems not to have cured yours. Not sure if we are going to get such cold conditions again, but it may be worth a try if we do. Or maybe you could find a frozen food company with room to park a car in their freezer… Alternatively, with the
help of your local mechanic, maybe you could remove the relevant microchips and pop them in the freezer at home.
Good luck – I’ll let you know if it recurs (probably tomorrow, now I’ve said all this..!)
Tony
