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£380 parts and labour? Bite his arm off.

Thanks Liam, It would appear that the car has been on a Longlife service schedule, which would be applicable to vehicles covering high annual mileages, and yes, that can equate to services being due every c18k or so miles. Since you are only covering around 7K mikes a year, it would be recommended that the car be on an annual service, since low mileage operation can put more stresses and strains on a vehicle than one covering high mileages on motorways etc. Independents should be able to carryout these services, and most should have access to recording their servicing on Audi’s systems, so that the service history is continued - we take it you have copy of the servicing which had been carried out, before your ownership. Kind regards, Gareth.

Firstly, please note that all screenshots are from the OBDeleven app. I bought the "old" generation device for about £50 from Amazon and then paid another £21 to purchase a year's subscription of the OBDeleven "Pro" version of the tools. It is worth noting, that the only advantages the newer generation of OBDelven gives are: Able to use it with an iPhone Potential future support for other cars such as BMW So, if you are using an Android phone and are only intending to work on VAG cars, there is no apparent benefit to paying the extra for the "next gen" version. YMMV. ___ Also note that this relates to a 2012 Audi A3 8P 1.6D hatchback. It is probably that it will apply to other, similar models in the range and of a similar age. Regardless, maybe it will help to provide people with some direction if hunting for a similar problem on their car. ___ Now, to the issue I was having - my instrument cluster failed and was irrepairable. However, the company ECUTesting were able to transfer the code from my "dead" cluster into another, second hand cluster. This process seems to have been successful and, at a total cost of about £380 (including the purchase of my OBDeleven device and Pro subscription) has saved me over £1200 when compared to the £1600 Audi were wanting to charge for a new instrument cluster (plus the probably £100 fee for having my car towed to their garage!) When I got the "cloned" instrument cluster back, there were some superficial warnings showing up in OBDeleven all of which were cleared with the press of a button. However, two warnings remained: one relating to the steering sensor and another relating the TPMS. The steering sensor warning/error cleared within about 30 yards of just driving the car. The TPMS warning however was more stubborn and beligerent. It manifestied with a warning message when the ignition was truned on, relating to TPMS (too quick for me to catch sorry) displayed on the information panel, followed by a persistent, "amber" TPMS" warning banner on the instrument panel. This was coupled with the lower tyre pressure "icon" being iluminated on the left-hand side of the instrument cluster. There was a menu option available in the instrument panel to save the current tyre pressure values, but when selecting this, I simply got a message back informing me that this operation had failed. Obviously, the first tool in my arsenal is Google. A quick search revealed to me that there are two types of TPMS - one that makes use of pressure sensors that are fitted to the wheel itself and these then transmit the information to another module. The second type uses some magic mathematics to do with the ABS sensors and calculates whether a tyre is flat based on the rotational profiles of the wheels as you drive - pretty cool stuff.I also came across a post on another forum where someone had an issue and it turned out that their car had both types of TPMS enabled instead of just one. So, this left me with a couple of questions. Firstly, does my car even have any form of TPMS? I don't remember seeing anything relating to this since owning the car. Next, assuming it does, what type does it have? As the replaced part was the instrument panel, my initial instinct was that it was simply misconfigured and I so I investigated the options available through the OBDeleven app for the instrumentation panel and came across the following option under adapation: Here, I could see that the bit was set to enable TPMS and so I decided to simply change this bit to disable. Unfortunately, this had no effect what so ever and the warning message and light just continued to stare back at me... Next step was some more Google searching where I came across a thread someone else had posted on another forum where they appeared to have both versions of TPMS enabled. A bit more digging on Google and hunting through OBDeleven and I discovered that the magic settings may exist within the ABS module which, for the "rotational" version of TPMS makes sense - but I didn't expect the sensor variant to also be controlled through here. But it turns out they are. Entering the long coding menu for the ABS module and navigating to bytes 16 and 17 reveals the following settings: I will be honest here, I have no idea what the "TPMS Reset" bit on byte 16 does - it seemed to make no difference to me so I returned it to being unset and left well alone. The "Tire pressure monitoring" bit on byte 16 seems (well I am guessing here) to indicate whether the TPMS uses sensors - the value underneath toggles between "Installed" and "Not installed" depending on the setting. On byte 17, "Tire pressure monitoring via instrument cluster (2011+)" seems to indicate that the TPM operates using the rotation calculation and again, the value toggles between "Installed" and "Not installed". There is some interaction between these settings. Setting the bit on byte 17 (to indicate TPMS via the cluster is installed) resulted in the amber warning message in the instrumentation panel going away. However, the flat tyre warning icon remained illuminated. Clearing the "Tire pressure monitoring" bit (so that it shows to be "Not installed") resulted in this icon being extinguished. Well, the settings above are the ones that seem appropriate for my car and I now have no TPMS warnings. It remains to be seen if the rotational calculation works and I get a warning - for that to happen, I will need to pick up a puncture whilst driving - something I hope will not be happening in the near future! I hope this helps someone else who may also be suffering from such a problem - I know this started out as an instrumentation cluster failure and has nor morphed into a TPMS setting "tutorial" (for want of a better word?) - if anyone thinks the particular post would better serve by living somewhere else on the forums, feel free to move it or let me know where to put it and I will happily duplicate the info there.