My passenger side rear went recently, and like you I also had the horrible dings and dongs going on in the car with error messages flashing away.

Turns out the caliper had stuck and wouldn't unwind.

I managed to get a guy come over to the house with a VCDS and he was able to get the caliper to wind back using the VCDS.

The car then ended up at German specialists, who ended up replacing the caliper and a control unit of some sort (resides in the boot apparantly), at a cost of no less than 1130 smackers!!!

wasn't best pleased to be honest as apart from the cost, they didn't seem to know what was wrong straight away. I wish I had had a go at it myself now. Does anyone know if these can be overhauled/repaired? I know that the dealers take the old ones back and refund you the surcharge if you return them, so obviously they must be doing something with them.

What an expensive ball ache! Two motors supplied by Audi - both existing ones were in very bad shape. One new one fitted and went on fine, the off side however was a mess. After much wrestling, it wrote off the calliper so I had to source a completely new assembly for the drivers side. Thank God for Euro Car Parts.
These park brakes are a menace when they go wrong. All is well now, some £800 later.
They still make a ridiculous noise....

From what I recall euro car parts didn't have any Stock recently..how much were they and what did you pay for labour?

The motors from Audi, guessing they were a few hundred each?

Glad to hear you've fixed the issue though!

As luck would have it, Euro Car Parts had one off side rest in stock which is what I needed £168 all in with the motor and caliper. Irritatingly, I had just paid £250 each for just the motors from Audi. You live and learn...!

What sort of noise does it make?

Mine was replaced just before I bought the car and they are noisy when compared to the two passats in work.

Loud whirring... But at least they don't grind anymore! Yes, they are noisy compared to my Dad's newer A5 but I think that's just what they're like by design.

Can someone explain the rationale behind EPBs. What drove an engineer to say, "you know, there is a problem with the old fashioned parking brake system and I can design something which makes it better".

What was the problem? how has the EPB made it better?

I am genuinely curious. :Confused:

Form over function I suspect.

The designer was there drawing a car and thought the parking brake was ugly and never flowed well for his current dash designs, so removed it and forced the engineers to go EPB.

I thought the foot parking brakes from the BMW 7 and VW touaregs was fine.
Even the old patrol pull brakes at a push.