[LewisTiburon]

So for anyone who remembers my story, my Audi S5 had issues with it when I purchased it last year. Nothing on the steering wheel worked (media controls, button lights and paddle gears) plus a few other things.

After a long back and forth with the garage, I finally decided to take it to a local garage for repairs and now claiming back the money pending a court hearing.

But after getting the car back from the Audi specialist, they told me the initial control unit for the steering wheel wasn't adequate and only gave button illumination but not function, so they had to get another unit, and finally everything was working... Almost.

Only weeks later, my paddle gear downshift doesn't work, upshift still does. Also, the lane assist doesn't come on. Before it would work very occasionally, but there's definitely something up.

I'm just wondering if anyone has ideas on what's wrong?

Interestingly, I played back dashcam footage of my car when it was in the garage and overheard the mechanics saying how the first guy to troubleshoot my car with the diagnostic machine made a mess of it and I got a part I didn't need. As to the extent of this "mess up" and what part I got, who knows. It's just put me on a bit of a downer because not only am I dealing with a garage that's unwilling to pay for the faults the car had, the garage itself seems to have messed up in part the work on my car.

Sigh...

 

[JohnS4]

The steering control unit is actually the clock spring in the middle of the steering wheel. There are different revisions of the clock spring depending on car specification. If the wrong version was fitted that could explain why the functions didn’t work. It could also have been a coding issue, the modules need to be coded for the features fitted to the car.
Sadly most dealers have no clue when it comes to coding modules and simply avoid it unless exchanging old faulty modules for new where there “guided fault finding” process transfers the coding.
The buttons on the wheel work on a bus system. If shift up works but shift down doesn’t it’s likely to be the cable on the switch or the switch itself. There are very small connectors linking the shift buttons to the back of the controls on the front of the wheel. The downshift cable may have been disconnected. You should have the car scanned for faults it’s a tool such as VCDS from RossTech. You can read fault codes and test the switches without taking anything apart.
Finally the Lane assist, if you turn this on and the system is faulty you will see a range of possible messages with more details. Do you see the amber light in the cluster when it’s on?

 

[LewisTiburon]

Cheers for the advice.

So for the steering wheel, they fitted the J527 steering module but were "unable to carry out basic settings due to fault with J453 control unit" so that was added on.

They did write in their report they were "unable to confirm lane assist as no codes stored".

I do believe my local mechanic checked the car for any code faults and found none, so it isn't showing up as far as I'm aware.

As for the lane assist, when I press the button nothing happens, including no sign from the display on the front, no light.

When it did work (intermittently) it did bring up the amber sign (I believe that was the colour) so I knew it was activated.