This is no longer corporate greed, this is corporate extortion.

This is not by mistake, it's by design.

A. friend took her Renault back to their dealer to get a dashboard light fixed.They wanted £400 because they said they would have to take the whole dashboard out and it would take 5 hours to fix.She said forget it!When she got home she checked her guarantee and realised it still had 2 weeks left,so they fixed it.She was surprised to get a phone call 45 minutes after leaving it saying it was done.When she pulled them up about them saying it would take 5 hours,they said 'oh,we found a quicker way of doing it'!That was a legitimate Renault dealership.I swear if I ever buy another car it will be either a moggy traveller or a Triumph Herald.I can take those apart blindfolded!

We are being rinsed. There is no other reason but corporate greed.

I recently had to replace my BCM... £700 for the unit from Ford. I found a used one and cloned the data £175 all in. I opened up my old one to see why it cost so much.... Virtually nothing to it... You cannot tell me we live in a world where a decent laptop can be bought for £500, yet a simple circuit board and a few relays cost £700....

I bet it cost £50 to produce...if that!


This is NOT the fault of the consumer wanting all the bells and whistles (as someone commented)... This is the fault of major manufacturers charging a ridiculous mark up on the electronic units that are produced en masse for a fraction of the cost.

Built in obsolescence, one of my mates (who is an engineer) told me about this over thirty years ago.

I work for a parts company in Northern Ireland.. Over the last two weeks I've sold three headlight units to customers.. A BMW driver, an audi driver for an led being out.. A WHOLE UNIT.. £634 and £700 before coding.. The worst was a Ford, failed mot due to a small bit of condensation in a tiny bit of the unit (away from bulbs) £836!! I've spoke to a load of mechanics over the last two weeks over this and they've all said (without exception) that the manufacturers know exactly what they're doing. £700 for a light!!! It's disgusting

A bleak future for the car industry  both for dealers and us. What a wasteful way of wasting our hard earned cash.

Try disconnecting the battery to completely power down the BCM. I recommend leaving it disconnected for at least 12 hours. This will force the MCU inside the BCM to perform a hard reset, which might help solve the problem.

Right to repair is so vitally important. Any environmentalist will emphasise Repair, Reuse, and Recycle - in that order.  Scrapping a whole car for something silly like this is a gross waste of the energy & materials used in manufacturing.

Who thought the day would come when old British Leyland cars would be more reliable than a brand new car from the 2020s

Our little 2007 Fiat Panda is still running strong and can be dissembled with a screwdriver and a hex key and be repaired after watching a few youtube tutorials most of the times.

The same thing has happened in the domestic washing,tumble dryers,fridge & freezer machines across the board.😊😊

The phase 'married to the main dealer' just makes me physically sick.

I had a theory a long time ago why luxury cars never seem to signal.  Its probably $500+ to change the bulb, removing shrouds, washer fluid reservoir, or whatever is blocking access.  So the less you signal, the longer the bulb lasts.

I had on old Honda Accord estate with a powered tail gate. The motor to open the tail gate failed. It was feasible to open the tail gate manually .. but a sensor stopped me from opening the tail gate from the outside. I could only open the tail gate from the inside. Honda wanted to charge me £90 (back in 2015) to diagnose the problem, not repair it. A replacement motor would cost about £900 ish to replace (for a car worth less than £3K). I just paid an auto electrician to disable the sensor, so that I could manullay open the tail gate from the outside.
The car was written off a few months later by an SUV driven with more enthusiam than skill. So I'm glad I dod not go for a full repair.

Recently retired vehicle electrician here.
CAN bus controlled cars have been around for over 20 years now. The Controlled Area Network links various control modules together so that data from one unit can be used by more than one system. The downside is all inputs and outputs go through at least one computer, any of which can fail.
On a car this has never made sense to me, bear in mind I used to repair these systems, as one of the 'benefits' of CAN bus systems is supposed to be less wiring. But on many cars both the switches and the lights go to the BCM so it doesn't reduce the wiring it only adds another level of complexity and something extra that can go wrong.

Something so important to safety as lights MUST be repairable at the side of the road by the motorist with little skill. Government MUST bring legislation that requires OEMs to build their vehicles with that in mind! I once had a Citroen C5, on which to change the daytime driving light bulb, the wheel and wheel arch lining had to be removed and a special tool to open the light was required. The bulb was cheap, the work ridiculous.

Built in obsolescence, just like phones, white goods and just about everything else we buy. 😀🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

I remember back in 2009 when my mates brother-in-law couldn't work out how to change his dipped beam bulb on a Fiat Stilo, so he took it to the dealership and qas quoted over £300! Me and my mate are well into our cars so offered to change it for him for free, but my god!

We practically had to remove the whole front end if the car to gain access to the headlight bulbs 😂 the whole procedure was absolutely ridiculous. It took us about and hour to do a bulb. It was so ridiculous we nipped to Halfords while the front end was off to buy more bulbs and change all of them while we had the car pulled apart 😂