We were called to Southampton where a customer was eager for (what he called) the wizards at vagwerkes to look at his car.

An unamed local garage had fitted a new engine after the customer had reported that the engine was making noises at idle. This led to the car not starting and the customer was forced to pay the bill and had the car towed to his house. This was all done before we were called and much to our frustration, we were not called on the first instance.

After some basic tests we determined that the problem was with the ECU. The customer also had their old ECU at hand, as we learnt that the customer had been advised he needed a new ECU.

After opening up the ECU, we could see that the immobiliser chip had been tampered with and most likely swapped between ECUs by someone who had little or no knowledge. We could see the immo chip was soldered on back to front. After some repairs we had no luck communicating to the ECU – the customer required a new ECU before we could even look at that the original fault was.

Luckily for the customer, We were able to give an independant review of the car and advised the them to contact trading standards as they were clearly being ripped off.