Coldest day of the year recently and my heated steering wheel stopped working. The LED on the button still worked and I still had the message in the dash saying it was turned on. Fired up ISTA on the laptop and no faults were found. I then went into the function activation section for the FEM module which deals with the steering wheel heating, activated the heating function- which only works for max 30 seconds, hardly enough time to know if the wheel is heating or not. Activated the LED on the button on the steering column, then my laptop died! LED wouldn't even turn on after that point! Charged the laptop last night, went into ISTA this morning, still no faults found, so called up the ECU functions again and reset the FEM module. Result! LED light working again and best of all the steering wheel heats up once more Total cost £0
A £0 fix is always a result. Maybe it was just having a bad day and didn’t want to play, happens to us all!
Are you sure it wasn't simply 'clocking' the heating, due to the battery SoC. Cold morning, high energy consumers can be controlled until SoC is higher, and/or alternator has spare capacity to allow more functions. Will depend on where the steering wheel sits on the priority list. Warmer day, back to normal. Could be as simple as energy demands. Peter
I did think that at first, but the coldest day I referred to was sometime last week, if it was purely the car turning off electrical consumers due to temperature then I'd have thought it would have worked during the last few mild days we've had. Also since the heating came back the moment I reset the FEM module I would be inclined to think that it just got it's knickers in a twist!
