Volvo v70 headlights

My dad has cut his teeth on electrics for years and often solved a few issues, both at home and on the cars.

I'll give you this example.

We have a 2007 Mondeo 2.5T at home. 2 years ago, maybe 3, it started randomly opening the bootlid, or rather the car thought it was. We would slam it shut etc and despite it being closed it was fine. One day literally 3 days before an MOT we noticed the rear number plate lights and fog lights didn't work, along with the tailgated sidelights, the body ones were fine.

I changed the bulbs and despite some of them looking on their way out they still didn't work! My old man against my wishes then put another earth in. That didn't do anything!

We go out Forscan and read the codes. They went as follows:

• Rear fog light open to ground
• Rear number plate lights open to ground
• Rear Number plate lights short to ground

The last error was down to us. This is why I say code readers can be handy .

I tried tracing the wires back to where it should be, looking for an earthing point to clean. We then stripped out the boot. Eventually we found all of the earths went back to central points as I said earlier.

We then checked the boot wiring again. It was only when we completely stripped the tailgate to its bare bones that we found the fault ; the wires had pinched hence why the boot saw itself as open and the lights were off. We put in some more flexible wiring and all was well.

We even managed to fix the cruise control ; the boot claiming it was open kept on knocking it off .

Basically, bodgery will only get you part of the way in most cases and moderns won't tolerate it unless you go back to a true source.