Volkswagen Polo IV (2005 - 2009) - 05 1.4 brakes locking up

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Sun 16 Nov 2008 15:53
05 1.4 brakes locking up - bananaman
My mum has an 05 Polo (1.4 Tdi) which just a few weeks out of warranty exhibited a fault whereby the offside rear wheel locks up whilst in motion.

Aside from the fact that the garage replaced her front brakes ("I have a problem with my brakes") and almost replaced the rear brakes at considerable expense (the car has done less than 40K miles), they now think that it is an ABS fault.

The fault is intermittent but my mum is now very worried about driving the car - the fault so far has only happened at low speed but if it happened at motorway speeds the result would be an immediate loss of control so it is extremely dangerous. The fault goes away if the car is left for 10 minutes.

Does anybody have any thoughts on
1) Likely hood of goodwill by VW or the garage towards fixing the fault. My mum has it seems already spent a considerable amount of money on things that haven't fixed the fault.
2) The cause of the fault. The garage just seem to want to keep replacing very expensive components (1200 for the ABS unit) when it could just be a sensor malfunction.

Help appreciated

Edited by Dynamic Dave on 16/11/2008 at 18:10

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Sun 16 Nov 2008 16:06
05 1.4 Polo brakes locking up - Screwloose

Why do the garage think that it's an ABS fault? Are there codes?

Does it lock under braking, or on its own? Does it actually skid - leaving marks - or is it just the ABS functioning?
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Mon 17 Nov 2008 10:17
05 1.4 Polo brakes locking up - bananaman
The brakes apply themselves. The problem is very intermittent - I don't believe there are any fault codes. I don't know whether the wheel just locks up or whether the abs does apply itself - the failure has happened at very low speeds so it is impossible to tell
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Mon 17 Nov 2008 13:07
05 1.4 Polo brakes locking up - Screwloose

Hmm; not a lot of firm detail to go on. Does this one have ESP fitted?
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Mon 17 Nov 2008 13:50
05 1.4 Polo brakes locking up - DP
Likely hood of goodwill by VW


Never known anyone get anything out of VW, but it's worth a call.

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