Week Thirty-Seven In Which I Investigate Tecknik-al Erratum

I have a chum, a famous sound engineer who spent a year finding a car. An Audi – a full on petrol-powered non-eco beast of a TFSi big bloke model, I think it’s an A6. Trouble was, it was loaded with all manner of stuff from the factory. It had literally every factory electronic option bar a superior sound system, as I was going to sort that bit out for him. That’s what took him the time to find it. It was a dealership director’s car and had low mileage, too. Trouble was, when he took delivery and trundled off, he later found that when he put it into reverse to say park, the engine ignition simply cut out. Made him look a bit of a tit on the high street. He took it back to the shop…
The car was dozens of thousands of pounds worth and I followed the trail of confusion as first the dealer, then the travelling technician, then finally all sorts of bods in Milton Keynes at the UK headquarters failed to fix it. Then, it had got to the point of importing German engineers to come look at the car while my chum had a similar model on loan throughout. To be fair, it did seem to become hard to replicate the fault. And in the end, he got a newer car by way of replacement.
This cost Audi silly money and as far as I could work out, their engineering and systems analysis was just not up to the job of utterly unscrewing the inscrutability of their own OEM-approved electronic systems. This reveals how scary complex all that stuff must be of course and why Alpine spent £100,000 on an RF test chamber to make sure it is never going to be them that causes such technical problems.
Now whilst this was amusing enough to be mildly entertained that my globe-trotting chum was giving them an increasingly deserved rugged time of it, (to an honourable conclusion) it’s not funny when the consequences of a tech cock up could manifest themselves in the body of a small child still strapped into her car seat being the last bit the fire service retrieve from the aftermath of the full-on forecourt petrol pump fire.
I was sent this:
A couple of weeks ago, I was filling up at a petrol station, about to go to Cadwell Park when my car decided to set itself on fire whilst I was filling it with petrol – engine off keys out of ignition. I will be perfectly honest, it’s a nice car but it’s replaceable. However my daughter was strapped into the car whilst this happened. I was lucky enough to see what was happening and immediatedly dropped the pump and grabbed my daughter and pulled her to safety. After a short while I went back to the car armed with a small fire extinguisher, lifted the bonnet to find a small flame on top of one of the ignition coils. I spoke to Audi UK regarding the matter and apparently there was an “improvement scheme” to replace the coil packs. “no recall was ever done as that would imply that the car had safety issues” NO SHIT SHERLOCK!

I consider myself to be very lucky. However, what concerns me now is other people. If this same thing was to happen to another person the outcome may well be very very different. I’ve spoken to Audi UK who appear to be in damage limitation mode. They have replaced the parts on my vehicle for free and checked the car over to say it’s safe. They don’t seem to be taking the possibility of this happening to someone else very highly.

I ran this past my engineer friend and he was concerned but said that Audi would have had a whole bunch of questions about possible non-standard wiring and so forth and said that the failure would have happened whilst ‘live’ and that the coils, even once disconnected at the petrol station could still be the thermal source of ignitionof the plastic covers. In any case and at any age of the car, though, this is Not Good and has proper frightened our Talk Audio stalwart who PM’d me his righteous fear and anger. After all, they knew.
Now, I can’t diagnose from a single PM, yet this does sound like an issue to me. Yes, it could be a car audio nutter’s car with massive cables installed. But in twenty years, this is a first for me. Burning coils? Actual flames of fire? Petrol station? In an Audi? Doesn’t look nice, even with the words in different sentences.
Is it awful bad luck, or do we have ‘Rückwärts durch verwirrung’ instead of ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’? And do we have to have some more cars burn to find out? And will anyone die? Just some light frothy questions this journalist has this sunny September morning&;
Adam Rayner On Line Editor