HELPDESK: Answering all your motoring queries
From P Murphy: My 2007 VW Passat has 47,000km on it, and it has been stalling recently. I took it to the garage and they tell me the steering column lock will have to be replaced (this is connected to the steering column itself, including a control module) at a cost of approximately €1,500 and it is not covered by warranty.
I was a little upset at the cost and typed in “Passat” and “steering lock” on the web. Now I am wondering is there a defect or design fault with this, as there appear to be thousands of posts and blogs about this problem on discussion forums.
They all seem to point to there being a problem or defect with this part. The garage insists it has never heard of the problem before.
According to a spokesman for VW, the problem concerns software on the control unit of a limited number of the current Passat models. VW Ireland now has updated diagnostic software that can rectify the problem on affected vehicles.
VW has added the complaint to the “goodwill list” for its warranty team. Those who believe they might have a problem or who have already paid to have the problem fixed should contact VW customer care on 01-8989700. The spokesman says a full recall has not been considered as it is not necessarily a safety issue.
From L Dillon: For all the coverage of electric cars, there has been little coverage recently of the Better Place model. I read about them at the time there was an announcement by Renault of electric cars coming to Ireland. Are they still part of the plan? In case you don’t know, they are a firm with a model that enables you to drive into a filling station, quickly swap the batteries in a car and drive off again. It’s basically like refilling your car, and if designed into the cars properly it will take a lot less time to change a battery than to recharge it from the mains. Surely this is a better solution than having people hang around plug sockets for hours while they wait for the cars to recharge?
They are not part of the immediate plan for electric cars here.
On paper the idea seems eminently sensible. However, I would have serious doubts about it becoming a reality in the near future. It depends on one of two propositions, either of which I doubt will come to pass. The first would be that all car firms use a standard battery pack. That’s akin to cars today using standard engines. The problem with this is that car firms treat fuel economy and performance as critical areas of competitive advantage. The reality is the car market is cut-throat and every possible advantage over a rival is eagerly pursued.
In the world of electric cars, the key criteria will be performance and range (the distance you can drive between charges).
The ability of the battery pack will be as important as the engine is today. It will be the new source of competitive advantage.
I suspect car firms will resist any attempts to standardise the batteries. If you are in any doubt about the difficulties of standardisation, just consider that drawerful of phone chargers at home. If mobile phone firms and laptop companies can’t agree to standardise their chargers, what hope for standard battery packs in cars?
The other proposition is that Better Place stocks the various batteries from all the car marques. That seems even less realistic as models change regularly, and new improved batteries will be launched along the way. So you will not only need a set of batteries for each marque, but potentially for each model.
Finally I would doubt that even if the car firms could be swayed towards standardised batteries, they would be eager to hand over control of the recharging operation to a single outside firm, given the decades of difficulty they have had trying to distance themselves from a dependence on the oil firms and oil-rich nations.
It makes far more sense to standardise the plug-in system, and then people can choose an electricity supplier to recharge.
Ideally the industry would standardise itself and Better Place would work. However, a drawerful of different phone chargers, a house full of travel plug adaptors and a library of books on the hyper-competition in the car market leaves me rather doubtful that it will happen.