Strange breakdown

[iptsoe]

Evening,

We had quite an unusual break down in our polo this afternoon in our 6 week old 1.2 SE tsi.

First of all when the other half was about to leave the office she noticed the engine management light on, tried to stop and realised she had no brakes, missing another car in the carpark by mm!

I drive over and sure enough EML is illuminated, and the brake pedal is rock solid. I have a look under the bones and didn't notice anything unusual despite the fact it was really hot

Call vw assist who arrive in just under an hour and he finds the servo feed pipe split advises that it shouldn't happen and to get it to be checked by VW ASAP.

He checks the code on his VAG com and firstly it displays an unknown fault and didn't recognise the engine code.

Just wondered if anybody has experienced anything similar?

[jammydodger]

Hi, luckily I haven't had the same issue, however my 6C 1.4 TDI was in a couple of weeks a go for a recall on the brake servo. They advised they was contacting all users so maybe worth a call?

[iptsoe]

Thanks Jammydodger

I called VW whilst I was on the way over to help her out and the sales guy stayed until just before 7 and waiting for us to get it over for them to get it in tomorrow morning they also gave us a demonstrator whilst they check it over.

[iichel]

could be a vacuum system problem?

[iptsoe]

Picture taken from the loan car-



it was this connection that failed, hopefully will get some answers later today as to what the cause was

[iichel]

6C0 612 041 is indeed the vacuum hose for the brake servo

[RUM4MO]

Oh great! Wife picks her 1.2TSI SEL in about 6 hours, these pipes look and tend to be solid plastic so should not be failing, back in 2001 Seat Ibiza, and maybe 6N Polo had this issue with firm rubber pipes that aged quickly and failed, so things just do not seem to get sorted properly, do they?

[iichel]

to be honest, i'm not familiar with the scale of these issues. i would guess (or hope) that this doesn't happen on a large scale since loss of braking servo functions is literally life treathening, as the brakes fade after a few braking events. as your wife experienced. the handbrake is prbably the only rescue, together with stalling the engine and bang the clutch on.

[alexperkins]

Oh great! Wife picks her 1.2TSI SEL in about 6 hours, these pipes look and tend to be solid plastic so should not be failing, back in 2001 Seat Ibiza, and maybe 6N Polo had this issue with firm rubber pipes that aged quickly and failed, so things just do not seem to get sorted properly, do they?

The 6N2 had the same issue with the solid plastic hose. It used to crack around the joins onto the non-return valve fitted to the pipe. Repair was to fit a flexible thick rubber bridge section

[RUM4MO]

Wife got her 1.2TSI 110PS SEL yesterday, and that is one long bit of piping, hum, does not seem like the best idea, though probably the cheapest. I did ask, after seeing this thread, "has this car been worked on due to the recall for the servo pipe?" answer was, "any recall work would have been flagged up during the PDI" - time will tell. I had to sort out the flexible heat shielding as it looked like it had been added after the engine/trans had been fitted and not really doing much - more "protecting" the turbo area from losing heat than protecting the surrounding pipes including A/C discharge pipe from this heat source. So far 15.5 uneventful miles plus, the dipstick actually works as you might expect on this engine - ie leave it overnight and it shows the max level, old BBY and other engines tended to give an extremely high wrong level indication if left overnight. One thing though, the dipstick does have an O-ring seal, but the bore of the fitting point seems to be a big too big in diameter, again time will tell if this is relevant.

[iptsoe]

Ours had just broke 1000 miles before this happened.

I had a phone call from them last night saying that the replacement hose would be in today and they wanted the master fitter to take it on a test drive to try and ascertain exactly why the pipe came apart at the join, I don't know exactly why they needed permission to take it on a test drive!

The thing I don't understand is - if you look at the pipe on the left hand side there is a T shaped piece of solid plastic that pokes out why was this not made flexible with a sort of hook on the female side as a form of retention just in case something like this did ever happen

[iptsoe]

didn't hear anything from VW yesterday so I called them today, apparently the hose is now due in tomorrow. It seems that VW have decided to upgrade this hose at some point in the last 5 weeks (otherwise i would have thought that it would have been replaced during the pre collection checks......)

Otherwise they are full of s..t and are fobbing me off because it's a warranty job!