Water leaks into the passenger side footwell of my VW Passat. The boys up at my local garage, Tune Rite, discovered this when I asked them to diagnose why the alarm kept going off. Apparently the alarm gubbins sits in the footwell, nestled in an inch of acoustic wadding which had become wet although the carpet was dry to the touch. This is a common problem with Passats, judging from the online forums, and I think I may have hit on a reason why. Christ it’s so simple I wanted to shout about it on every forum I’d visited but form filling soon diluted my enthusiasm. ‘Just read my fucking blog’ I growled at the second registration form.
Before I get to the solution, the problem represents a good example of right-on solving for the ordinary man, with all its associated ups and downs. It’s worth charting the course from start to finish to demonstrate the true value of determination and an uncluttered mind, I’m sorry the story is a bit dull but stick with it. The more I think about it the more I see, it's really quite exhilarating.
One winter’s night about two years ago a neighbour came round and mentioned the alarm sounding, intermittently, through the night. I tried to disable it that night using the dog-in-car button and the next day I freed up the tailgate switch which appeared to have jammed open. This made no difference and so I checked the fusebox to see if I could just disable it before someone took a golf club to the windshield in a bout of midnight frustration.
Of course, no alarm worth its salt is easily disabled and eventually I was forced to take it over to the boys at Tune Rite who diagnosed the fault and said the water leak was probably from the cabin air box, which is fixed to the engine bulkhead over the footwell. Others on the internet supported this view and as it seemed a reasonably straightforward investigation I decided to do it myself. In the meantime the lads disconnected the alarm.
The summer came and went and the job slipped down the list, the following winter the car would flash its lights every so often after it rained and a new warning light flicked erroneously on the dash, saying that the airbags had packed up. I really must get in there when the weather’s nice again, I told myself but there never seemed to be the time. It wasn’t until this winter when the carpet started to grow mushrooms that I resolved to investigate, or pay a professional to fix it.
It pains me to see one of my assets degrading but cars have also cost me a lot of money, too much given that I choose ones with cheap-to-run reputations, and the temptation was strong to just drill a hole at a low-point in the footwell and turn it into a draining system. I could live with a few flashing lights, if that’s as bad as it gets. I did wonder if the problem would drain the battery over time but I’d replaced it a couple of years back and it still seemed to pack plenty of punch.
So, this weekend, with baby Liza snuggled up asleep in her car seat and Jane and Poz off to the pool, I popped the bonnet to investigate. I’d taken a bit of time to swot up again on the internet on Friday and I was as ready as I could ever be. There were a lot of leaves in the nooks and crannies of the engine bay and I scooped these out as best I could, then I pulled off the bulkhead-to-bonnet acoustic seal and lifted the plastic battery/airbox cover.
Some horses went by and I lowered the bonnet, apparently racehorses think car bonnets are open metal mouths waiting to eat them, or some crazy shit. Then Liza started to stir and I realised I wasn’t going to get the un-interrupted time I needed to fully dismantle the airbox and make a proper job of it. I stood in the resident’s car park watching the horses amble up the road and felt defeated. Reluctantly, I replaced the cabin air filter and slotted the plastic cover back in place.
Now, you have to imagine a weathering detail, like roof tiles, or the overlapping boards making up the wall of a shed. The runoff from the windscreen in this design is channelled into the engine compartment over three lapped pieces of plastic to eventually drain away under the car. The final lapped piece is this cover which I had slipped neatly between the two other pieces beneath the windscreen, thinking this was how it was properly fitted. The boys at Tune Rite had done the same, replicating the arrangement they’d found when they opened her up. But if each successive tile isn’t lapped under the one above, water will get in, just picture that.
Somebody had taken this cover out and replaced it incorrectly, before it went to Tune Rite, sometime in the winter of two years ago, when the alarm started sounding for no good reason. Which bastard could have done an idiotic thing like that? It was then that I remembered having to replace the battery, after the first big freeze of that winter. I did it. I did it in bad light in the freezing cold and god only knows how many of the Passat owners out there have done precisely the same thing. Those poor bastards. Replacing a battery is a standard thing for a bloke to do, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of them had spent hours taking things to bits, unblocking drain holes, spewing silicone around under the bonnet and probably all for nothing.
The garage charged me £100 to tell me the electronic gubbins in footwell was damp. The airbag light probably stems from the same fault. Mouldy carpets and warning lights and the recent failure of the rear n/s electric window, which may turn out to be related, will all impact on the resale value of the car. The cumulative depreciation resulting from this basic error hardly bears thinking about. In this sense it would have been cheaper to have a battery man do the battery, even with a call out fee (as I couldn’t drive the car). But even my trusty local garage didn’t put the cover back correctly so there are no guarantees that a professional wouldn’t have made the same basic error. The thing is the cover actually fits better when fitted the wrong way.
So maybe the fault lies with the designers. Certain parts should not be fit-able in more than one way. I don’t know yet but if I have fixed it, I’ll be over the moon, quite literally skipping down the road. I am man, I can protect and provide. I’ll know by the end of the winter.
As a footnote, I also noticed that on frosty mornings the car doors wouldn't open. The locks weren't frozen or anything like that, the door seals had become welded to the chassis by ice. I surmised from looking at the seals that this was ice forming from the inside. The extra humidity in the cabin which often resulted in condensation and frost on the inner face of the windscreen had had the same effect around the door openings. This was a real bind on mornings whan I was in a rush and I must have come close to damaging the seals trying to get into the car. One small mistake, heaps of knock-on problems which were hard to relate back to the original error.
