Hi I am new on here so apologies if I post in the wrong place
I have a 500 twinair street 2012 which I bought from a main dealer in 2015 (18k on clock then) which is having a run of bad luck.
It has 33k on the clock now , regular servicing by fiat. in March I had to have a new Twin air unit (£1000); It then had a service a few weeks later and everything ran smooth for a week. Parked the car for four days, went to start it last Friday - nothing. Battery , radio lights all ok but the dash showed the generic fault icon and a car/padlock icon. Recovery service could not start it so it was towed to Fiat. their expert says I need an injector ECU replacement starting at £1000 for the part. so my questions are

1. should the ECU be failing without warning
2. should it be failing at such low mileage or is that irrelevant
3. could it be a transponder as internet searching seems to suggest (what ever that is)

needless to say I am pretty annoyed at the possibility of spending over 2.5 grand on the car in less than a month .
I have contacted Fiat Customer services as I am mightily miffed about this. previous Fiats have not suffered the multitude of problems this twinair has.
has any one on here experienced similar problems?

As the car is with Fiat, it's dealer's responsibility to get it fixed if the part you've been quoted doesn't solve it (and both parts should have 12 months warranty too). I'll be honest, I've thrown good money after bad at cars. I'd get it fixed and buy a Panda 1.2 instead if it was me. I've not had either issue on my Panda 4x4 anyway.

Hi. And welcome.

Did you have 18 months of trouble free driving??

This sounds like an issue with basic wiring circuit..

Possibly related to the fairly intensive recent work..
Or possibly just a poor connection somewhere

Where are you/ the car based..??
Charlie

Susiken said:

needless to say I am pretty annoyed at the possibility of spending over 2.5 grand on the car in less than a month .

Click to expand...

Understandably so.

The problem with modern cars is that they rely totally on proprietary electronic modules to run. These modules are sourced by the car manufacturers based on price; there is no incentive to specify quality parts providing that the majority are good enough to see the warranty out. Replacements cost much, much more than the manufacturers pay for these units in the first place. They know that, at the end of the day, there is little you can do but pay the price.

Not just a Fiat problem; I'll bet you could find similar posts on the respective forums for any marque you care to name.

I'd certainly raise the issue with Fiat customer services. You'd be more likely to get a contribution if you are (1) the first owner of the car and (2) it's been serviced within the franchised dealer network, but even if these don't apply, you could still be lucky.

I'll keep my fingers crossed for you.