I have had a problem for about a year now, I have done lots of searching for fixes, I have seen quite a few posts on this forum, Audi forums, and Volkswagen forums describing the same issues but no ultimate solution, or people never came back to put them on the threads they started.
The problem is difficulty starting, seems to be random, sometimes starts straight away, sometimes takes a few tries, other times you have to wait an hour or so till it coughs in to life which was killing me as I work in the community visiting patients, I ended up parking around the corner to avoid the embarrasment of patients hearing me try to start the car over and over again.
Lights come up on the dashboard intermittently, steering wheel, ABS, and tyre pressure.
I would pull up somewhere and dread coming back out to the car as I never knew if it would start or not, and if it did would it start nicely or like a bag of bones with a bellow of smoke when it did.
I plugged the car in to VCDS multiple times and got no error codes, so the car thinks that it is doing nothing wrong, which did not make sense.
I tried starting the car while plugged in to VCDS and of course it worked most of the time, it seemed to have some drop in power the few occasions it struggled to start.
I changed the battery and starter motor about 8 months ago, which seemed to help it for a few months and then it kept on getting worse until a few weeks ago when I booked two weeks off work to do some work to the car.
I had no idea what could be the problem but my genius friend was positive it was an earthing problem, so I bought some good quality copper wire, different size lugs, crimpers and heat shrink.
We took the airbox out and found the earthing wires, removed them and suprise suprise, rusted and pitted to hell, all of them but one in particular.
The cables themselves were crunchy and the lugs and chassis where the lugs sat were pitted badly. I was told the pits in the metal are from sparks, which is power robbed from the starter motor when trying to start the car. Hence the bad starting.
One of the earths is placed in a horrible position under the air box, and when it is wet, it sits in a pool of water.
We made new cables, cleaned all surfaces as best as possible, removed the rust, removed the pitting as much as possible, unfortunately we had no copper washers to crush and fill the remaining small divots, ran one extra cable in addition to the one that sits under the airbox, so if this one gets wet or whatever its load is shared.
The car now starts on the button! It is a dream to drive again, and its funny how much trepidation I used to get but not realise, until now that its gone.
Whilst I was there, I used virusol a citric cleaner to degrease and clean as much metal surface as I could see, rinsed it off, then dried it as much as possible, then applied a hard carnuba wax to encourage as much water as possible to vacate the area quickly and quietly.
The problem is difficulty starting, seems to be random, sometimes starts straight away, sometimes takes a few tries, other times you have to wait an hour or so till it coughs in to life which was killing me as I work in the community visiting patients, I ended up parking around the corner to avoid the embarrasment of patients hearing me try to start the car over and over again.
Lights come up on the dashboard intermittently, steering wheel, ABS, and tyre pressure.
I would pull up somewhere and dread coming back out to the car as I never knew if it would start or not, and if it did would it start nicely or like a bag of bones with a bellow of smoke when it did.
I plugged the car in to VCDS multiple times and got no error codes, so the car thinks that it is doing nothing wrong, which did not make sense.
I tried starting the car while plugged in to VCDS and of course it worked most of the time, it seemed to have some drop in power the few occasions it struggled to start.
I changed the battery and starter motor about 8 months ago, which seemed to help it for a few months and then it kept on getting worse until a few weeks ago when I booked two weeks off work to do some work to the car.
I had no idea what could be the problem but my genius friend was positive it was an earthing problem, so I bought some good quality copper wire, different size lugs, crimpers and heat shrink.
We took the airbox out and found the earthing wires, removed them and suprise suprise, rusted and pitted to hell, all of them but one in particular.
The cables themselves were crunchy and the lugs and chassis where the lugs sat were pitted badly. I was told the pits in the metal are from sparks, which is power robbed from the starter motor when trying to start the car. Hence the bad starting.
One of the earths is placed in a horrible position under the air box, and when it is wet, it sits in a pool of water.
We made new cables, cleaned all surfaces as best as possible, removed the rust, removed the pitting as much as possible, unfortunately we had no copper washers to crush and fill the remaining small divots, ran one extra cable in addition to the one that sits under the airbox, so if this one gets wet or whatever its load is shared.
The car now starts on the button! It is a dream to drive again, and its funny how much trepidation I used to get but not realise, until now that its gone.
Whilst I was there, I used virusol a citric cleaner to degrease and clean as much metal surface as I could see, rinsed it off, then dried it as much as possible, then applied a hard carnuba wax to encourage as much water as possible to vacate the area quickly and quietly.
