Status: Malfunction!

VAG-COM Diagnostic System readout on Suga’s car yesterday at Top One.

Our Volkswagen Golfs are pretty computerised. The VAG-COM Diagnostic System (VCDS) is a Microsoft Windows-based software package used for diagnostics and adjustments and yesterday at Top One I realised how freaky it all is. A laptop is plugged directly into a diagnostic port under the steering wheel and your service guy can see everything you’ve done to the car (for people who like to modify cars without the dealer knowing, that makes potential warranty claims pretty tough!).

The software had to first of all be updated to the latest version, once this was done (took seconds) the readout spotted the time we installed the larger DSG gear paddles on the steering wheel, and the time and duration the alarm went off the other day, but what was more interesting was that it came up with some small random errors, all of which were electronic ones and what caused them is a mystery. Hitting the “clear” button fixed these errors and everything was back to normal again.

It’s like doing a disk diagnostic on your PC and finding errors, not caring what caused them and just clicking “fix errors” and then getting on with it, but in this case one of the errors stopped the passenger side door from unlocking when the key fob was clicked. Pretty freaky. Speaking of PC’s…my mac mouse batteries died last week so I replaced them, then a few days later the mouse started losing bluetooth connection, super fucking frustrating as you’re working and all of a sudden your mouse freezes on the screen and there’s nothing you can do but keep violently clicking the mouse button until the mouse re-connects. It kept doing this for a few days, by the end of it I was swearing out loud and smashing the fucking mouse (mighty mouse my ass).

I did some research, seems like heaps of people are having the same problem, but like most mac issues, Apple refuse to officially acknowledge the problem. /vent.