D2 gearbox scare (A8L 2000)

[johnny_quattro]

I was on my way to a funeral of all things last week, and had the car washed prior to attending. On my way there from Surrey to Hendon, North London - my gearbox went into limp home mode (all lights illuminated on dashboard, namely PRND432). I was rather unimpressed as I'd only had the gearbox done at great cost (£3K) in April 2014. To add to my woes, the range on petrol sank from 55 miles down to nothing in no time at all, due to the added revs to keep the old girl moving.

I had to pull in to get petrol, and thankfully when I started the car again there were no errors on the dashboard. It all seemed to work perfectly. Another couple of miles down the road, and PRND432 lit up on the dashboard. I made it with 3 minutes to spare, thankfully. On the way home, it did the same again on two occasions. Each time, I pulled over and did the IT thing and switched the engine off and back on again. It seemed to be some sort of electronics fault as I didn't get the so-called 'bang/whoomph' when selecting drive.

The next day and every day since that fateful moment have been OK. No further occurrences. I have a sneaking suspicion that this could be due to water ingress in and around the area under the bonnet on the right hand side close to the windscreen. I do have a weird error on the car where it seemed to show the brake drum icon prior to the gearbox fault showing up, which again ties in with my hunch that it's possibly due to water getting in somewhere. I think that the two events are related (I've asked my friendly Eastern European friends to be a bit more careful when washing the car as they do seem to be over-zealous with the jet wash lance.)

I'm hoping to look at the car over the weekend and will report back with my findings. An initial look under the bonnet showed the tell-tale white lines of where water once sat and has since dried up.

Note - scan using Torque app on Android and Bluetooth ELM237 shows no fault codes at all.