Quick tip 06 Jetta wiper diagnostics

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I did a diag a couple days ago on this Jetta and found the linkage assembly siezed up and the gear in the motor got stripped as a result. The customer bought the motor and linkage, the parts weren’t available until today, and it was my day off so I had to turn the job over to a friend. He called me up today because the wipers didn’t work after he got it all back together. I go in so we can sort through too many pages of VW wiring diagrams and compare them to Mitchell diagrams and theorize where to look next. The Mitchell diagrams were incomplete and the OE diagrams are endless & endlessly messy. I printed off a couple dozen pages of diagrams & code sheets for bathroom reading before we tried hunting some forums. We went through eight or nine forums before we found one that told us the wipers won’t work with the hood open.

The ridiculous and stupid moral of the story: Close the hood.

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[Mike]

My god I hate VW, and I’ve had one for over a decade. VW stopped making good cars around 98-99 and just completely lost sight of their older and insightful ways. The heyday has long since been over.

I really appreciate the tips though. My shop sees way too many Volksjunkens, and it’s likely this design flaw will come up in the shop at some point. We’ve certainly had seized wiper transmissions in there before for the Mk4 (99-04) but luckily nobody has taken this beating yet…

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Another thing that turned up funky with this was that there’s some kind of park position relearn for the motor install that requires disabling something or other with a scan tool. My friend tried using the shop’s Genisys and it warned him that the aftermarket stereo installed might cause irreparable damage to the scan tool. I loaned him my modis to see if it could do better and he’ll find out tomorrow. He’s hoping that leaving the battery disconnected will instead be enough to cause a hard reset and an automatic configuration once the battery is reconnected.

I hate VW’s too. It’s ridiculous how they let an aftermarket radio cause so much trouble in their cars. I can’t remember the specifics, but removing the stock deck can cause problems on VW CAN bus systems. I’ve seen a few installs where after they install the aftermarket deck in the dash, they then find a way to tap the stock deck back into the bus through a harness in the trunk and then just leave the deck laying there doing nothing useful. If it’s that important for the radio to be on the CAN bus, I’d think that changing the station from the pop music channel to talk radio changes the fuel trims on acceleration.

[zero]

[quote=”no_common_sense” post=119889]The ridiculous and stupid moral of the story: Close the hood.[/quote]

This is possibly one of the stupidest things ever. I almost got burnt by it once. Why Volkswagen? Why?

[Author]

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