TECH HELP EDITOR
Q Why will my campervan not lock properly?
I have a 2010 VW Transporter 5.1 campervan. My central locking has stopped working. I can lock it with the key fob and manually with the key. The problem is when I lock it with the key fob, I don’t get the double clunk of the central locking.
If I try and lock the ’van while driving with the door pin, it just pops back up and won’t lock.
Neil Mason
A The good news is that most garages should be able to diagnose the fault, it just takes a little time for a process of elimination. You may be able to do some of this yourself.
Most central locking faults where the system is trying but failing to lock are caused by one or more of the lock units failing to close properly. If the latch is out of alignment, obstructed or broken, this will be detected, and the locks will try to operate but bounce back to unlocked.
The first thing to do is to ensure that all of the doors and locks on the vehicle are closing properly. They may not sound right when you close them or the doors may not be properly aligned. The striker plates on a lot of door locks can move if the securing screws have worked loose or if they’ve been struck by something.
If all of this seems OK, you need to operate the remote while listening, maybe with a hand on the lock, to hear or feel something out of the ordinary. If one lock feels different or sounds different to the others, you may have found the problem.
If this bears no fruit, and frankly, even if it does, the best thing to do is to use a screwdriver to operate them and the handle to release them while adding a generous helping of light oil to make sure that they are all clear of debris and operating freely.
If the problem is not mechanical, then it must be electrical. Each lock has a solenoid attached to operate it remotely when instructed to do so. Normally these solenoids come with new lock mechanisms and are generally not available to buy separately but, with VW locks, I may be wrong. On the rare occasions that I have seen solenoids sold separately, they have been no cheaper than buying the lock with solenoid attached.
This sort of thing happens a lot, so it should
