[Fast Reg]

Sorry to drag this one up from the depths, but I thought I should post an update.

Towards the end of March I was getting the "Brake Failure" message more frequently so took it in to my (not so) local main dealer. They whacked it on the diagnostic machine and reset all the fault messages that they said appeared to be going back quite some time. After they did this the car ran faultlessly.

Well, until this week that is.

On Tuesday I got a repeat of the "brake failure" fault message while on my way to work, but was able to clear it by turning it off and on a few times. Then on Thursday I got the same fault message again but the car then refused to play ball and gave a whole heap of other fault messages. In the end I had to call out the breakdown service to recover the car back to the main dealer for attention.

When I got the call from the dealer's Master Tech I was faced with a lot of questions. Had any work been done on the car? Had I suffered a flat battery? Had anything been removed or disconnected? All the answers were "No", the car has had nothing done to it since it was in towards the end of March. Needless to say the diagnostic machine had thrown up a whole array of fault messages covering the battery, power steering, brakes and engine management systems, among many many others. Some even seemed to contradict each other, as I'd apparently logged battery over-voltage messages alongside battery under-voltage messages. And in all that time the car had run faultlessly, never failed to start and had never exhibited any other symptoms.

So now I'm at the point of having to monitor the car. Any further fault messages and I'm to take it straight round to the main dealer again, which is not entirely convenient considering where the main dealer is in relation to where I live and work, and the type of work I do for a living.

What I find most galling is that the car itself appears to be fault-free and the problems seem to be down to some spurious ECU fault. I happen to quite like this car, but I'm beginning to lose faith in it and am wondering whether or not I should now change it. I can't really afford to keep chopping and changing, but I would really expect more from a car that is just 3 1/2 years old with 35k miles on the clock. No other car I have owned has caused me this much trouble except for my very first car, but that was an old banger with more than 100k miles under it's belt.

I'm just glad that the main dealer I'm using appears to be a good 'un. The trip up to them in March cost me £57 for the diagnostics, but they did also give the car a full health check and clean it inside and out too. This time it was just the diagnostics, but they allowed me to have this gratis.