rust under glass (skydome?)roof 500L 2014

Hi,

I'm new to this forum. Hope you can help me.
We have our 500L for 4 years now, and recently I have discovered 2 big rust holes (!) under the retracting glass roof - one each side of the roof.
The holes are so dip now that water is coming into the car when it rains...

The holes located in the front end of the glass, where water should be evacuated...
I'll add some pictures later.


Does anyone else have such a problem?

The manufacturer says it is a "user damage".
I don't know what to do, the price of fixing it is more that the whole car worth.

Thanks
Tal

Some pictures would help a lot with finding out where you mean
Also may help other owner keep and eye out of this area

It sounds like the roof channel drains have corroded. There's probably meant to be a hole there with a plastic pipe inside it, to take water down into the wheel arch, behind the plastic wheel arch liner.

If the hole got blocked then the water will have pooled there and rusted the metal.

But I dunno how it's "user damage" unless they're saying it's your fault for not noticing the channels weren't draining properly. I can kind of see that point of view.. but I'm not sure it's completely reasonable. Even if it's flooded, the car shouldn't have rusted already (at least, not in Israel). See if Fiat will make a contribution to the repair.. it sounds less than great at the moment.

If Fiat isn't interested, it should be fairly simple to repair it.. a car body shop might be able to patch it somehow without dismantling half the interior.


Ralf S.

Hi Ralf and all,

Thanks for your responses.
Please see the attached photos.
I urge all the Fiat owners with retracting sun roof to check this area for rust.
If you have any initial corrosion or rust damage please take photos of it and post it here - this would help me showing the manufacturer that it is not the first case.

Thank you,
TalY

Is there a hole (I mean an "official" hole, not a rust hole ) in there to act as a drain? It looks like there isn't.. and the water collecting there has simply rusted the channel.

You should try to claim under Fiat's bodywork/corrosion guarantee... although you might get no change if you didn't have the car bodywork "inspected" every year... I dunno how Fiat can argue that it's not their problem.

But... having said that.. a bodyshop would be able to repair that... although the sun-roof and the liner will have to come out. Not a huge job... but not trivial either.


Ralf S.

Ralf, thank you.

The car was maintained at a formal Fiat service center.
I actually want to find the service manual for service centers that Fiat publishes to its service centers.

In the car service book, it is stated that for SOFT roof they need to inspect and grease all mechanisms every 15000km.

TalY

The photos look very odd to me. It looks like there is a build up of something in the channel like sand or dust that's gone hard and blocked the drain holes. The paint also looks badly weathered is there a lot of sand blowing around where you are ?

Hi,
The material in the channel is the rust...
The paint looks bad because it is dirty - it was raining and the air was dusty.
I have attached a picture of the car in daylight. No problems with exterior color.

TalY said:

In the car service book, it is stated that for SOFT roof they need to inspect and grease all mechanisms every 15000km.

TalY

Click to expand...

By soft roof you mean the standard fixed glass roof with (soft?) electric sunshield ? IMO there is no 'soft roof' for the 500L, as it is used in the 500C. And I cannot find such information in my manual.

Apart from that - I find it quite disturbing that there can be that much rust on a 5 year old car ...

Brandy