Fault: ESP / Move Selector Lever to Position P/N!

[stewartboak]

I thought I would share our problem with other Scirocco drivers as maybe we have finally discovered what was causing the above fault.
We have had our Scirocco since around 20,000 miles (purchased in 2011) and now it has over 90,000 miles .... for the last five years it has been in and out of VW dealers in the UK and now that we live in France it has also been into the local VW dealers. We have had two replacement mecatronic units (not to mention a new engine at 70,000 miles due to a failure of the can chain tensioner but that is another story) the car has spent weeks in the dealers whilst they disconnected and reconnected cabling, waited for sensor alignment tools to arrive from VW Germany, etc etc. Always they have returned the car, the problem has gone away and then returned. The problem is that this was an intermittent fault. It occurs when you first turn on the ignition, the engine does not turn over, you get an audible beep and then ESP fault move lever to P/N. Of course it is already in P/N. We have been able to work around the fault as normally if you turned off the ignition, left it for a minute or two, turned it back on it was okay ... but recently the problem has been getting worse, more frequent and at times we had to wait an hour or more before it would start. A couple of weeks ago we were back in the UK and the car would not start, not for 3 hours ... after assistance from the AA and other issues (long story) we finally get the car to a small business run by ex Audi/VW technicians (CS Engineering, Chris/Simon 00 44 191 340 7877) ... after a couple of hours they traced the fault to the earth cable from the gearbox to the chassis, corroded/rusting with a resistance of 15 ohms. After cleaning the connection and splitting the earth to chassis connections (there was another earth lead also attached with the gearbox earth) and then applying sealant the car is running perfectly or at least has been since the 20 December and all the way back to France (700 miles) ... it was an intermittent fault so maybe it is not fixed .. but maybe fingers crossed after 50,000 miles and 5 years maybe it has been something as simple as an earth fault all this time ...

[chelspeed]

That's an interesting one. Utterly useless to 99.9% of the readers then pure gold for someone if they get the same symptoms. Thanks for posting.