2010 1.2 Polo Moda - Battery Drain

[conorjex]

Morning Everyone.

I have a 2010 polo moda 1.2 petrol - all standard. Suffering with a flat battery maybe every 3 days.

Recently got a new job a lot closer to home - maybe a 6 minute drive. Since then I have been having a massive issue with battery drain. If I don't drive the car everyday it is likely to be flat. I have had the car in VW and also an independent garage who have had it on the drain machine and cant find anything at all.

Has anyone else had the issue?

I have made no modifications to the car at all - apart from a new bosch battery about 18 months ago. the battery has been returned and tested fine.

Obviously such a short journey wont be great for the car but does anyone have any other ides.

Can I turn the day time running lights off?

Any suggestions are welcome.

Could the alternator be at fault?

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

[RUM4MO]

So, it sounds like very few Ibiza and Polo basic models, were fitted with an incorrectly coded BCM, and this is exactly what happens to cars with that issue.
As your car has been fully checked by a VW garage, that should mean that your car does not have any faulty modules or wiring, but that testing will probably have done nothing to expose or pinpoint this draining issue.
What you need to do now, if you are still trying to fix this is, go back to that VW garage and make sure that they will not or do not need to carry out any further diagnosis and waste and waste your money, but they need to check for any S/W patches that are available for your BCM, now initially that will probably end up with them finding nothing, is so they really do need to log a battery drain fault with VW’s maybe worldwide technical online resource and that should supply them within a few days of the S/W update reference which will need to be downloaded into your car - should cost 0.5 to 0.75 hour tech labour.
Sounds like your VW garage is being lazy and only checking for decent S/W updates, this one will be from round about 2010 if this is the problem with this car.
How do I know this, well I’ve been there done that with a late 2009 build SEAT Ibiza 1.4 SC it did take me time to find another dealer that would consider that this was a possibility, my second SEAT dealership, luckily they had just gone through this issue with a 2010 Polo they had taken in as a trade in!
Good Luck as having a car that plays that game is not good.
Be aware that there does not seem to be much in the way of updates records held anywhere even within the car, so all they will be doing is downloading that fix without knowing if it has already been applied, only you will know if/when things improve.

[iichel]

Well, once a battery goes flat, it's usually a write off. Cells become internally shorted and worn out. On such a short trip, perhaps the car simply isn't able to recharge the charge overnight and from starting. A long drive every few days might be a solution, or perhaps it's worth looking at an alternative means of transport for a 6-minute trip?

[RUM4MO]

Although the OP says that the second battery is okay, so while it has been discharging it probably has not being going flat so, as in my daughter’s Ibiza with its second, also Bosch brand battery, the battery could still be useful, I did check this second battery using a CTEK battery tester after this issue and it had survived it okay.

Also I was reading into this that the OP, knowing that short journeys would not be good for the car, had chosen to use other means to get to work most days, though maybe I was wrong there.

Once you have had a car with the known about by VW Group BCM management S/W issue, it is not good at all, consider this, each time you go to use the car, you are left wondering, will it start, horrible situation with main dealer saying no fault found!

Edited to change "usual" to "useful" !!

[conorjex]

Thanks for the responses...

RUM4MO - Thanks I will look into this.

Iichel - I do tend to walk unless I have something to do after work. Which has been fine over the summer but with the weather getting steadily worse I don't want to be sat in the office soaking.

Have a good day and thanks again.

[iichel]

Haha don't worry mate, I'm not criticizing you for taking the car. It's just that the battery is not getting its recharge 'mileage'

[conorjex]

I didn't think you were haha

Any ideas what the best "output" would be from the alternator when the battery has a load on?

[iichel]

Well there is voltage and there is amps. The voltage should be at least 14 volts, that's something you can quite easily check with a multimeter. The amperage (current) is a bit more difficult, but I suspect a broken alternator would struggle to reach 14V. So I'd start with that.

[RUM4MO]

If you only have a voltmeter and want to check is an alternator is fit for its purpose, you could connect a voltmeter across the battery terminal, start the engine, and with someone to press the accelerator, increase the engine revs to 2000>2500 RPM and switch on the headlights + full beam + rear window heater and the voltage should still be close to 14.4Volts, maybe a bit less though.

Edit:- in VW Group speak, this is a "J519" S/W update/correction and the workshop software code number for that was “30eb” , if that helps you get this sorted quicker. (j519 is the circuit reference for the BCM (Body Control Module) which is the module that is responsible for closing down all unnecessary power supplies when the car is stopped.

[conorjex]

You guys are legends. RUM4MO - If I print this thread and take it with me to VW do you think I could skip some of the investigation. Rang them and they want me to book it in for the full works again.

[RUM4MO]

You can try, but like most things in life the people that call themselves "professionals" in an sphere tend to consider internet chatter is absolute rubbish - they have heard it all before and know the proper facts, which in your case seems to have lead you to a dead end, get the VW garage that checked that car for current leakage/battery draining - and charged you for doing that, to now do what they should have done immediately after running these tests, which was check their online resource for any S/W updates covering this issue, then after finding nothing, log a request for help with VW's worldwide resource and see what it comes back with.

I was fobbed off with VW dealers over engine S/W issues on my wife's old 2002 Polo and I gave up on that one and worked round it as it was only showing up as stupid impossible (for that engine) fault codes, in the case of my daughter's Ibiza it was different and just like you are experiencing so that needed sorting out - and that I found was not easy until you contact a garage that listens to what your problem is and accepts that maybe you are correct in thinking that it is just a VW factory, or supplier S/W mess up that is well known about but now maybe forgotten about.

Remember this, most master techs in dealerships are not much more than fitters that have access to an online database of help files, some of them are more than that and can think for themselves - you need to force the issue as you are paying their wages and hourly rates when you use them - you are the customer get them to do their best for you.

[RUM4MO]

Remember, if you do book it back in, make sure that they work to your instructions, which should be:- check for BCM ie j519 S/W updates or corrections, if nothing found, then follow the correct VW dealership pathway and log a request covering this battery draining issue on the VW resource pages or whatever they call it, they should know their own procedures but include the 30eb software code just in case it is still that reference for VW as it was for SEAT which it should be as the lower models body control units are the same.

Now here is a reasonably strange thing, when I first looked into this all I discovered was that a SEAT Ibiza owner from outside UK had had this issue and detailed how he resolved it, then a genuine SEAT Tech who was on that forum posted that there was no such an issue ever with these cars! I searched the internet further and discovered that it was known about on an RAC page from many years before, then one or two SEAT Ibiza owners with the same fault posted in and they eventually got their cars BCMs corrected, so I began to think that I could resolve this and handed the car into the first SEAT dealer who eventually replaced a module which cost a lot of money and did not sort anything, I have VCDS so I did know that that car was not logging any faults and that the module replaced should be inactive after engine stop and systems had been shut down, but sometimes you have to believe the experts, who in that event were wrong, that ended up with another visit for a few days with "no fault found" - back to me to get even more annoyed and eventually visiting the other SEAT dealer, who, by the way, was not my "dealer of choice" - but they did quickly get to the root of that problem using all the tools at their disposal, so 10/10 for them!

Edit:- just think of this, VW Group knew that this had happened very quickly, ie a BCM supplier had messed up with unit programming on a batch of BCMs so they must have known the range of unit serial numbers or production batch numbers involved, and where these batches had ended up, ie at which factories and used on which VIN range of cars, and could have corrected this prior to moving some of these cars out of the factories, or requested that the selling dealerships corrected this issue using available downloads for cars already moved out - but collectively they all did nothing and let these cars escape out to their owners with incorrect software really because VW Group could not be bothered! What it looks like they did was to leave the testing to the first owners which meant that if a car was used daily and had this issue, it would go unnoticed, though if the car usage changed it would show up, when these cars were sold on it might become an issue immediately. Now if a new car was not used daily and had this issue it would have been sorted by the supplying dealer under warranty, not how a world case product manufacturer should behave.

Another! Edit:- if it is just the BCM management programming that is wrong, remember this is not a fault that has just occurred, it is an initial build error or otherwise looked on by a buyer as a faulty component being used at the factory - most dealers will not have experienced this problem recently or maybe ever, but they need to be smart enough to consider that that car has that known issue.