lights out
At some point last summer, the interior lights in my 2006 Passat stopped working. This meant that the dome, mirror, door & trunk lights didn't come on when they were supposed to. I didn't discover it until the end of August, when we were loading up the car at 5AM for the Death Valley trip and realized, "Hey, its dark in the car and we can't see where to put stuff". At the time, I assumed that it had to be a blown fuse, since that was the most simplistic explanation for what would cause a bunch of lights to stop working all at the same time. I stuck to that theory, and didn't bother making a special trip to the repair shop, since this seemed like a minor nuisance. Finally, last Tuesday I took the car into VW for 70k mile service, and had them look into the dead lights at the same time. I took their shuttle back home, and they kept the car nearly the entire day (7:30AM - 3:30PM), and finally claimed that it was, in fact, a blown fuse, and it was fixed. When I picked up the car, the lights were working, and I was happy to know that it was something trivial all along (even though they charged me \$1.58 for the fuse and almost \$30 for the labor to replace it).
When I went out last Wednesday morning to go to work, the lights were not working again. Now I was annoyed, and somewhat worried, because it seemed like something was blowing the fuse, meaning that this was no longer something trivial, but something potentially much more serious. I called VW that morning to complain, and they offered to let me come back in the same day, but I was at work, and really didn't want to waste another day that week, so I took an appointment for this past Monday morning.
On Monday, I brought the car in at 8AM, and insisted on waiting there until they fixed it. History has proven that they tend to work a lot faster when I'm waiting on site. Finally just after 11AM, they claimed that it was yet again fixed. They said that the car computer didn't report any (new) faults, and they ended up disassembling and reassembling the fuse box in the hope that there was just a loose wire or part that was causing the fuse to get shorted out. Yet again, the lights were working, and I went off to work. The lights were still working later that afternoon as I drove home from work.
My confidence in the repair wasn't too high this time, and sure enough, on Tuesday morning, the lights were once again not working. Clearly, something bad is happening while the car sits overnight, outside. At this point, I'm about to give up, at least for the time being. They've had nearly 12 hours to figure this out & fix it, and have failed, and I don't care enough about inside lights that are normally only needed for perhaps a grand total of 2 minutes/month. Since this problem has existed for at least 3 months, and hasn't gotten any worse, I'm (hopefully, not foolishly) assuming that whatever is wrong isn't going to spread, and this can last until I take the car in for its 80k mile service sometime in 2010.