My wife has a 2001 GTI with 51,000 miles on it, which we bought used from a VW dealer (suburbs of LA Calif.) last November. For the last several months it has had an intermittent problem where the ABS light would come on and it would beep 3 times. Often other lights come on, the windshield wiper starts going, the clock gets reset to 12:00, the trip meter gets reset to 0 and the engine stalls. The engine stalling is the serious matter, of course. Usually the problem clears itself quickly and the car can be restarted.

She has taken the car into the VW service place under warranty a couple of times, but they have not been able to find the problem. Finally it's become more frequent so we took it back to the shop again. They took it on a test drive and by sheer luck the problem happened while the service department manager was driving the car with my wife as passenger. Still, they can't figure out what's wrong with it despite it being in their shop for 3 days now and counting.

What kinds of things could be wrong, and why can't an authorized VW service center figure it out? On a side note, now that there is no dispute that the problem is real, what are my rights under the used car warranty if they never figure out what the problem is?

Can you please give us any advice you have?

Are you trying to get the dealer to buy the car back because you dont like your car and the amount of times its in the shop?? WHy would u complain if the service is free and you arent paying to repairs?




Sounds like the instrument cluster malfunction. or charging system malfunction.

I bought my car so I could drive it (not back & forth to the dealer for repairs).

Are you trying to get the dealer to buy the car back because you dont like your car and the amount of times its in the shop?? WHy would u complain if the service is free and you arent paying to repairs?
Sounds like the instrument cluster malfunction. or charging system malfunction.

My wife gets frightened when it stalls in traffic, for example, when pulling from a side street and SUV's are barreling down on her ready to T-Bone her little GTI. This has happened lots of times. She will ultimately be killed or seriously injured if the problem is not corrected. That, and she needs to be able to drive to work (she teaches college).

Anyway, the VW dorks appear to have wiggled enough wires to make the problem seem to go away at least for now. The only concrete thing they did was to clean up what they said was corrosion on the battery terminals. This might explain the problem of course but I would have thought they would have checked that on the first three times she took it into service for the same symptoms.

The sad thing is that my wife was a die-hard VW bigot who would never bought another brand until this B.S. and they way she was treated. Seems to me that it would have been better business for them to put in the effort to make her happy to keep her as a repeat customer. They did the usual service department crap of saying they'd call her in an hour after they tried one thing or another, but of course they didn't call her one time in the four days it was in the shop this most recent time. She left voice mails with various people and of course no call backs. I understand they are busy but she had to wait weeks for the appointment in the first place so you would think it was her turn to get a reasonable amount of attention and courtesy.

She teaches foreign language, and is busily preparing a series of lessons which makes fun of the VW dealership. I wonder if that might put a few of the kids off buying this brand...