Why don't you tell us how to fix it?
Quick answer: Our videos show how we find leaks, not DIY fixes. The repair varies by model and cause, leaks are often multi-source, and proper repairs need the right parts, sealants and safety procedures. A generic "how to fix" can be unsafe or wrong for your car. Once the source is proven, we explain the correct repair on a case-by-case basis.
We get asked this a lot, often by people who are annoyed and sometimes downright rude. The honest answer has several parts: money, competence, safety, and the limits of what a short video can responsibly teach.
Yes, we charge for the work
People sometimes accuse us of withholding the fix to force them to pay. They are partly right, in that we do have to earn a living here. The customer whose car appears in the video has paid us to produce that inspection footage as part of their report. Nobody is paying us to make DIY tutorials.
We don't ask for SuperChat donations. We don't run a Patreon. We don't even ask you to like and subscribe. We make no attempt to grow the channel and we have no ambition of being professional YouTubers. A DIY-fix channel might in theory pay its own way, although we doubt it, and in any case it isn't what we want to do.
If you have to ask how to fix it, you probably shouldn't
Most of the repairs we carry out are basic and straightforward to anyone with real mechanical competence. A person with that level of competence doesn't need to ask "how do you reseal a door membrane" or "how do I replace a rear vent?" in the first place. They already know, or they can work it out from the car in front of them.
You might reasonably reply: "If the repairs are straightforward, why not just show me?" The problem isn't the repair itself. It's what surrounds the repair.
Water and electricity don't mix
Many of the places we work inside a car are hazardous. On electric and hybrid cars, they can be seriously dangerous. Even on petrol and diesel cars, there is plenty of scope to do expensive damage to electrical systems, and by definition every leaking car has water somewhere it shouldn't be. Water and electricity is a dangerous combination.
Our staff attend safety training courses before they're allowed to work on EVs, and there is a considerable amount to learn. None of that fits into a YouTube clip.
Airbags are explosive devices
The other big hazard is airbags. They are essentially controlled explosions packed behind trim.
A while back I watched a DIY video of a chap taking a door apart to fix a membrane leak. He was thumping and banging around the inner panel in a way that could easily have fired an airbag. The car he happened to be working on didn't have door airbags. Next year's model might. Anybody copying him could lose an eye or a couple of fingers.
An airbag deploys at around 200mph. Anything between you and the cover -- a screwdriver, a trim tool, a hand -- is coming back at you at that speed.
Black mould is a health risk
We do talk about how to reduce mould risk in your car. Off-the-shelf products can kill it at source, and simply airing the car out regularly lowers the risk considerably. The risk is real, though, and we treat every car we work on before we open anything up. Black mould is another factor a DIY channel would have to account for, and another reason we aren't going to start one.
Insurance and liability
We are fully insured for the work we do in our workshop. We very much doubt our insurer would extend that cover to DIY advice given out on YouTube. It's a fair question whether any insurer would. There are already plenty of videos online showing how to fix the most common leaks on popular vehicles, so the real question is whether the advice in them is actually good.
From what I have seen, often it isn't.
A lot of the cars that arrive at our workshop come with "bodge job" repairs already in place: sunroof drainage pipes glued onto their connectors with Araldite, blanking plates held on with bathroom sealant, grommets replaced by silicone blobs. We regularly have to delete comments from our own videos recommending exactly that sort of thing.
What we will tell you
Once we have proved where the water is actually getting in, we are perfectly happy to explain the correct repair for that specific car, on the phone or in writing. We'll tell you what parts you need, where they sit, and what the pitfalls are. What we won't do is publish a one-size-fits-all "how to fix a sunroof leak" video and pretend it applies to every car that rolls past.