Hullo all,

Posting on behalf of my olds.... They have an old VW Polo 1.4SE (02/MK4), with an ABS light that's on. The local (independent VW) garage told us that either we can take the car to a VW dealer & have the ABS diagnosed & sorted for approx £1000 (ouch!), or we can give the car to the garage for 3~ days and he would take it to a VW place somewhere in Surrey & have it looked at (£700-£800?).

A brief search on those forums seems to imply that either it could be a sensor, or a fault in the ABS unit. However, I'm assuming for now that this garage knows what they're doing, and it's not the sensor, so the unit needs to be read to be sure of the fault. However this garage, being a Beetle garage doesn't have such an unit (hence the trip out to Surrey).

Does the above sound correct, and if so, is there any place in London (near the N10 area) where we can get the ABS unit read, so we don't have to have the car taken away for 3 days... Any suggestions/opinions would be highly welcome!

TIA!

Edited 28 September, 200817 yr by IndyJ

Hullo all,

Posting on behalf of my olds.... They have an old VW Polo 1.4SE (02/MK4), with an ABS light that's on. The local (independent VW) garage told us that either we can take the car to a VW dealer & have the ABS diagnosed & sorted for approx £1000 (ouch!), or we can give the car to the garage for 3~ days and he would take it to a VW place somewhere in Surrey & have it looked at (£200-£300?).

A brief search on those forums seems to imply that either it could be a sensor, or a fault in the ABS unit. However, I'm assuming for now that this garage knows what they're doing, and it's not the sensor, so the unit needs to be read to be sure of the fault. However this garage, being a Beetle garage doesn't have such an unit (hence the trip out to Surrey).

Does the above sound correct, and if so, is there any place in London (near the N10 area) where we can get the ABS unit read, so we don't have to have the car taken away for 3 days... Any suggestions/opinions would be highly welcome!

TIA!

Hi there all you have to do is take it to a garage get them to do a diagnostic on it and most times they can tell you what the problem is with in a few hours. If you get stuck i work in a garage in croydon if you want to come there on a sat between 9.00 and 12.00 i would plug your vehicle in and let you know what the problem was. And just charge you about £50 like most garages do. And i wont rip you off . Good luck. When you say beetles do you air cooled or water cooled cause if air cooled then they want have a diagnostics port. So won,t be able to read your vehicle.

That ABS sensor is a common problem on a lot of Volkswagens that age. I had the same probelm with my Lupo. Got a new sensor from GSF for a few quid (was under a tenner) and replaced it and its been fine ever since. If thats the problem and they are trying to charge you £1,000 I'd walk away cause its a stupid amount of money. Shouldn't take them more than an hour and the part is cheap as chips.

If you were closer I'd offer to plug it into a code reader for free but its a bit far to come from Surrey to Newcastle

Hi there all you have to do is take it to a garage get them to do a diagnostic on it and most times they can tell you what the problem is with in a few hours. If you get stuck i work in a garage in croydon if you want to come there on a sat between 9.00 and 12.00 i would plug your vehicle in and let you know what the problem was. And just charge you about £50 like most garages do. And i wont rip you off . Good luck. When you say beetles do you air cooled or water cooled cause if air cooled then they want have a diagnostics port. So won,t be able to read your vehicle.

Thanks for the offer! But N10 = North London (Finchley area), so Croydon's a _touch_ far :p

That ABS sensor is a common problem on a lot of Volkswagens that age. I had the same probelm with my Lupo. Got a new sensor from GSF for a few quid (was under a tenner) and replaced it and its been fine ever since. If thats the problem and they are trying to charge you £1,000 I'd walk away cause its a stupid amount of money. Shouldn't take them more than an hour and the part is cheap as chips.

If you were closer I'd offer to plug it into a code reader for free but its a bit far to come from Surrey to Newcastle

Yeah. The problem is this VW garage doesn't have the necessary reader, hence them mentioning the fact that they'd have to take the car out to a place somewhere in Surrey if we want them to sort out this place. The £1,000 price is what they say an official VW dealership could possibly charge for the work (& I can well believe them - if it turns out to be the ABS unit itself).

So at the end of the day, I guess we're asking the question - What independent garages in North London would have the necessary equipment to diagnose the issue? Dragon Green 97's reply seems to imply that most garages would have this stuff?

Hey mate i live in Finchley too, There is a VW specialist in North London (kingsbury area, 5miles from finchley), theyve the same vag hardware as main dealers, I'm guessing the computer called the VAS or something. I tried to swap an ecu on my car n went into difficulties with the immo using ross-tec vag-com. I did a google search and found these lot, they managed to do the swap and charged me jus under an hrs labour 50quid. Good service and very nice garage. Their website is www.rac-london.co.uk. Try them theyve got the computer facility to do the full diagnostic.

The problems with the control units is that the soldered joints dry and crack. We get all our control units repaired loads cheaper than a new one.

If the fault codes point to this you should be able to find someone to repair it.

Matt