Volkswagen Polo Mk5 Water Leak Walkthrough

0:00 Today we've got a VW Polo Mk5 in, and customers come to us because they got in the car one day and the passenger footwell is a wet, and they noticed it when someone sat in there. But there you go, I don't know if you can really see that, but this carpet and the insulation underneath is absolutely sodden, and obviously that's where we found the water, and a little bit in the rear passenger seat as well. Now this can cause all sorts of problems. One, mould which

0:37 can be bad for your health. Two, it can cause the car to stink. And number three, electrical problems, especially where the water is getting in around that area, and there's a lot of electrics under there. You can see the cabling, and I think on some cars even the fuse box is there as well, so can cause electrical problems, and some cases can even right off the car. Anyway, the car is not going to dry on its own, it needs a bit of help doing that, and we've got dehumidifiers and drying machines that we'll put

1:12 in. And the reason the car won't dry on its own is because there's so much water and it's right in the bottom, there's no ventilation to it, and usually cars don't have a lot of heat in them for a lot of time, unless you're in a ridiculously dry summer like we had last summer. So basically what we're going to show you is where we found these leaks. And number one is in the scuttle area. We come around to the front here, you can see the air intake for the air conditioning

1:48 in the car. Now we took the scuttle off, as you can see, and we looked down there and we found a lot of debris, dirt, sticks, leaves, that sort of thing. So much that it was actually blocking the drainage below. Now I have put a bit of tissue in there to artificially block it, as we did clear the debris out already, just to see what was happening with it. But we put a bit of tissue in there which simulates a bit of dirt and leaves quite well. My colleague's going to pour some water

2:22 in there now, and what we'll see is the water will start pooling up. And it does it pretty quickly because we're putting quite a lot of water, and that pulls up so much that eventually it pulls up and goes over the ridge of the air intake and ends up in the car. Now if I show you, and you see the water pooling there now, you've got to imagine that this could be an overnight rainfall, which could have a lot more water land on the car than a five, six litre watering can. So if we

3:04 come underneath here, what we will see is a vent, and we've been using UV dye. If I sort of look up there, you'll see some UV lighting up bits of water. There's one there, you see it, and that is where the water is working its way into the car. And obviously we've got to figure out how to fix it. Hopefully it's just as simple as cleaning out the scuttle area, and which it should be, and obviously we will send out an estimate to this custom of doing

3:49 that. And secondly, we found the leak, and we're not sure this one's even contributing to the water in the car, but we found a leak in the passenger side door membrane. Obviously water drains out the bottom of the door like it's supposed to do, but just under the plastic here you notice a drip through, which means water is getting into the door membrane and the door membrane isn't sealing properly. So we'll provide an estimate to repair that problem as well.

4:20 As I said, we don't think that is the cause of water getting into the car, but it's part of our 28-point check, and something we've noticed, and something that we do see go on cars. So we'll quote you for that, and we recommend getting that fixed as well. So yeah, that's pretty much it. This is the car, the Mark 5 Polo, and the water is collected in the front passenger footwell. For more information see the description below.