Smile ALERT! Semi Auto Gearbox.
I must bring my experience to Forum members attention.
My 500L Semi-auto refused to engage gears, i called out the AA and sure enough he came out and diagnosed low gear box oil, "cheap fix" he said??. He went off and returned nearly 2 hours later and continued to pour 75/90 gearbox oil into a white plastic reservoir!! I immediately raised my voice a little and said are you sure that goes in there? ( as I know enough about cars to know you don't put oil into plastic bottles etc) he immediately stopped pouring and put the cap back on the bottle looking very sheepish. Of course it still wouldn't engage gear because the idiot had filled the high pressure Selector Fluid Reservoir ( up to 75 bar pressure ) with gearbox oil. The original problem was LOW SELECTOR FLUID NOT LOW GEARBOX OIL!! so he had now contaminated it. It had to be towed to my local garage ( also friends ) who had to strip it down flush the system and as a precaution replaced the high pressure accumulator chamber. From a cheap fix it had turned into hundreds of pounds of repairs due to his incompetence. AA refused to cover costs so now I am involved with The Ombudsman. BE AWARE often this sort of problem really should be just a cheap fix a top up of selector fluid. Car has now done nearly 100,000 miles virtually trouble free!
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Most places would just recover you .

Having to wait for 3 hours..in the vain hope of getting mobile again
Is apalling frankly


TBH Ive never entertained the AA due to their 'relay' ethos.

A 500 mile recovery would mean several swaps

Perhaps interestingly, when my Ibiza's turbo wastegate actuator jammed up and put her into "limp" I was able to call "SEAT Assist" as she was still under warranty. A very nice and knowledgeable chap arrived quite quickly in an official VAG van and after plugging in his diagnostic gear and fiddling with the linkage said I was Ok to drive the car to the dealer and he would follow me and run me home after it was booked in. The entire turbo was replaced under warranty with a modified version - but that's all another story (with a happy outcome)

The interesting bit is that after the reception person had taken my details and got the SEAT Assist tech to make some written comments, she said to the tech "you haven't wiped it have you?" No replied he, of course not. I asked if she was referring to stored fault codes and she confirmed she was. I asked why and she told me that others, like the "chaps in the yellow vans", nearly always wipe them thinking that'll make it better when in fact all it does is makes their job harder because now the code may not be there to see.

So, whilst I would not like to go without roadside assistance cover (especially for our jaunts down to the south and Devon) I don't want them to do much more than change a wheel if I puncture two at once or bring fuel if I'm too stupid to fill up when I should or trailer me off in the event of serious malfunction. Even allowing a jump start would make me very very nervous.

By the way, on the subject of jump starting, If you really really have to do it be aware that stop/start systems will nearly always have electronic voltage monitoring (battery condition) in place with a monitoring sensor on the negative battery terminal. If you just have to do it then connect the pos to pos on the two batteries but then take the neg to your engine block or chassis earth NOT DIRECTLY TO THE BATTERY NEG TERMINAL as this will almost certainly confuse, damage or destroy this component. My Ibiza has one of these sensors and guess what? The manual details exactly this way of connecting up for a jump start. What you should do with the donor vehicle I don't know because likely it will have a monitor too? Personally, unless I could read the owners manual and see what they recommended - some seem to forbid jump starting altogether now - I wouldn't go near it and I won't have anything to do with someone's car who I don't know really really well and even then I would warn them, as I did with my friends old Jag "S" type, that it could all end in tears. Luckily it didn't in his case and he, mistakenly, thinks I'm "wonderful".

I just don't like the idea of connecting two cars together any more and I just wouldn't do it. I would risk connecting a stand alone slave battery or, if my back was really to the wall, disconnecting the donor vehicles battery leads before connecting the jump leads to it but of course you may then end up with a non working radio and other problems when you put the leads back on (for instance my boy's Astra has to have the electric windows taught how to open and close properly again!) I very much like the idea of these super capacitor jump starters but the ones with large capacity are not cheap and I have heard they're not so good for diesels because the glow plug pre-start current draw can drain them too much for enough to be left for the starter motor itself to function. However as we only have one diesel left in the family now I'm looking into them.

Here's one that takes my fancy:



I puzzled at first over how it can charge up from an almost "flat" battery but now I think I understand. Inside it are several ultra capacitors - lets say 6 just for ease of understanding. If each capacitor can be charged to 2 volts (I'm just using this as an easy to understand figure) then when connected in series they will be able to produce 12 volts to start the car. However if you connect them in parallel you only need a 2 volt source to charge each capacitor. I believe that's exactly what the "clever" electronics do so you can charge the pack from an almost otherwise flat battery. The main downside is that you are not going to get extended cranking capacity so if all that's wrong with the car is it won't start because someone left something on overnight and flattened the battery then this could be just the jobbie for you. If you've run out of fuel and need to pump it through the system by turning the engine over for a while you will be recharging it several times to get a start. Diesels I think might be problematic because most have to "light up" the glow plugs before cranking the engine. Glow plugs pull serious amounts of current so by the time the plugs have heated up and you're ready to crank the capacitors may be too discharged to crank the engine much. then by the time you've charged it up again the plugs will be cold so will pull current to heat up again. Maybe one of the largest capacity units would work but you're going to need deep pockets for one of them. For your average family petrol engined car though I think one of these would be absolutely ideal and you don't have to remember to keep it charged up as is the case with any of the battery jump start options.

Think I've just convinced myself to buy one - unless anyone can tell me different?

Oh! Just rereading what I've written here and noticed the link to that capacitive jump starter has disappeared! Could be a victim of the recent server migration exercise?
Anyway, here it is just in case anyone is interested?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3435InZF8E