Outwitting Your Vehicle's 'Brain'

THIS video:

Be about right at £125/hr. It's at least a 4 hour job and as the camber and toe adjusters are removed it needs an alignment job.

The M12 tri hex bit is available from machine mart in a set with M10, M12, M14, M16 and M18 bits. I found that out doing rear brake discs on my bothers Audi A3 after I had bought a Draper set of tri-hex, torx and hex bits that only went up to M10.

The video shows that the failure mode for this model of MB is the magnet ring becomes detached from the carrier on the axle.

There are no visible teeth OR visible magnets. The one removed was uniformly rusty.

They claim that the outer ring is in some way magnetised.

The policy is not invalidated (in England and Wales); read the Act.

My understanding is that there are two sides to this: the rights of the third party and the rights of the insurer.

The third party enjoys protection (with additional arrangements in place for uninsured drivers and untraced drivers). This has long been a feature of road traffic legislation, for reasons that are entirely understandable.

However, if the policyholder is in breach of policy conditions it is open to the insurer to make a claim against the policyholder (without prejudice to the rights of the third party). If you think about it, this has to be the case or there would be no incentive for the policyholder to be honest in the proposal form or to comply with the policy conditions.

Toe adjusters? On the rear hubs? All that should be necessary is for the components to be reassembled with the suspension under load.

Those will be for the brake calipers; nothing odd about that.

Machine Mart? Pah! Check this set out for value:

Er, it is! And it clearly doesn't have any teeth either.

Those are Torx these are tri-hex spline

But my brother's car was at my brother's home, 135 miles from my home and I wanted the job done so I could go home. I wasn't going to wait around 3 days for tools to arrive. As MM shop was on Bath side of Bristol it only took an hour to do Bath > Bristol > Bath.

So... what can they do that Torx bits can't? Plus Torx is *way* more common than those things. In fact I don't ever remember encountering something like that. The only reason someone would invent a fastener that tool requires would be to make it far more likely for the car to be returned to the main dealers when something goes wrong AFAICS.

It's been reliable for 18 years which not an unreasonable lifespan for a car (mileage and usage dependant).

Bullshit and it should be a lot easier to replace when it fails too.

ITYM triple-square?

The policyholder would not be in breach of the policy conditions; the 'rights' of the insurer are limited. Read The Act.

But it's highly unusual for this component to last *that* long, though! They can give up the ghost before 6 years even - and it's always due to corrosion. It's a well-known issue on these cars and the closer you live to the coast or the more you use the car on salted roads in winter, the quicker the problem will arise.