09 Tig Battery Fail - does it sound right?

[hatchy]

Hi Guys,
2 weeks ago my wife's Tig was in at Gary Crick on the sunny coast for a replacement of a leaky water pump. They picked this up on the 45K service. We had noticed the coolant light come on.

Today without provocation (i.e. leaving lights on, doors open etc), the battery is as dead as a doornail.

I got a call "can you bring your car and wait for VW assist" Great. Love spending sunday waiting at the shops for RACQ.

He did a test - gave me a print out - Midtronics MDX-P300 is the machine used. It says Replace Battery
Volts 12,36
Measured 157 CCA
Rating 600CCA

He asked if I wanted to buy a new battery, I thought I should first ring Gary Crick tomorrow and see if they have an excuse as to why it's flat so soon after a major replacement. Got a jump start, drove out to a fathers day lunch (30+minutes), and got another jump start from the brother in law - it's definitely dead.

What do you guys think?

Oh I should mention that I have no aftermarket accessories on the car like the other threads i've found here. We bought the car new in Nov 09.

Does the service guy mentioned on the forums here "JMAC" do batteries?

Cheers for your help.

[Sanman]

Batteries can last anywhere between 3 years and 8 years, depending on the quality (apparently the best quality batteries come from OEM Japan vehicles, as they use no recycled components)
Good that you have thought about aftermarket accessories causing current drain, it might be worth checking for any error codes that could be keeping the system alive, but your measured CCA makes it look terminal. From my experience the Tiguan battery has barely sufficient capacity for its load, I suspect that VW has used a 'hot climate' lower capacity battery spec for Australia.
Less than 2 years from the battery is not good enough, I would expect it to be replaced under warranty, but I suspect items like batteries only have a 3 month warranty, and would be replaced outside that on a discretionary basis. Ask the dealer to replace, see if the road service battery guy will replace for free, email VWA and complain, see if they will cough up a $100 battery

[Transporter]

Similar thing happended to my T5 when the van was short of 2 years old. I however drive very short trips, took it to the dealer and it was replaced under the warranty, no questions asked.

I've noticed that the battery in the Tiguan has less capacity and it is a smaller battery than in Golf5. Call the dealer and see, if they replace it for you free of charge.

[hatchy]

Thanks guys, I'll let you know what happens when we call up later today after they open.

[hatchy]

Alls well that ends well.

Marvellously handled by my better half.

Called Gary Crick first thing this morning - they said that VW Assist will get the car started and that she then needed to call the closest dealer and they will replace the battery.

We don't live on the sunny coast, just purchased from Gary Crick and have been getting services done there (I was concerned with the extended warranty that they offered becoming void)

Called Norris VW, North Brissie.

Excellent service, they took about an hour - replaced the battery and reset something.

Battery they replaced with appears from memory of what the smaller one is to actually be bigger in mAh - could be wrong, but it definitely looks different. Still VARTA.

Thanks to those that replied. Much appreciated.

[Chilli Freak]

Hey Hatchy I will be quite interested to hear how you get on. I recently took delivery of 2011 TIG and the dealers representative said that the battery had a three year warranty the same as the car.

[hatchy]

Replaced under warranty Chilli Freak.

[clip]

hmmm, I think that it's right that it was replaced under warrantee. My Tig is an '08 -although delivered early '09, but has done 70000k and has the supposedly leaky aftermarket headunit, and I live in sunny QLD and the battery is as good as it ever was. No problems at all.