Rear wiper failure - tailgate light stayed on

[Ren]

2001 2.4 V70 estate - first the rear wiper refused to budge even though the
washer worked. Then the tailgate light began to stay on and the "tailgate
open" warning was on too. I suspected a bad earth but when I took out the
trim to chase the wires back to earth I found that three of them had broken
inside the sheathed section where the harness leaves the door to reenter the
car body. It's cunningly concealed, running along the inside of the nearside
tailgate hinge. Anyway, I soldered them up and everything's hunky dory
again.

Just thought it might be of use to someone.

Steve

 

[~^ beancounter ~^]

was the wire break from chafing or rubbing...or did the wireing
harness just fail??

 

[Ren]

Very hard to tell. I may have misled earlier - the wires were broken in the
"slack" bit below where the harness runs inside the hinge. Presumably this
"slack" is there to allow the wires to take up the movement of the tailgate
opening. The strange thing (to me - not being an autoelectrician who
probably sees these things daily) was that the whole wire was broken, casing
and all. In the past I've had wires break, on a steam iron, for example, but
that was the metal strands inside the plastic casing and from the outside it
looked perfect. My wife, on seeing the harness, said, "It looks like they've
been cut". So I don't really know what happened. I suppose they could have
just become fatigued as some of the other wires running alongside the broken
ones had cracked plastic casings but the metal strands were ok. 4 years
seems a short time for fatigue to happen, though.

Steve