Spanner light
The ‘car with spanner’ service light comes on all the time in my 2012 Vauxhall Corsa D 1.3 CDTI. It does not flash and ‘Insp’ does not appear at any time. The car drives extremely well and recently did a fast 700-mile journey at 65+ mpg, so I would not expect the catalyst to need regeneration. I regularly use Red-x every fourth or fifth tank of Shell.
The handbook suggests there’s a fault with engine electronics that’s triggering ‘limp-home’ mode, indicating heavy fuel use or alerting that a service is due. There’s nothing unusual in performance or economy and a service is not due – a full service was done by a dealer only seven months ago at 74,704 miles. We live in a rural area and we don’t sit in traffic. We don’t drive many miles per year and only take journeys of 20-30 miles at a time. As the car has such a low annual mileage and services are done on an annual basis, I suspect the dealer failed to reset the service light, which is exactly what happened on a previous Corsa C.
I have done a pedal test – ie, held the brake and accelerator pedal down, then switched on the ignition without starting the engine – but no codes appeared and nothing flashed. Does this test work on the Corsa D?
My only other suspect is a faulty glow plug. The car starts perfectly, with perhaps a very slight chugging for a couple of seconds. One glow plug was replaced last winter by a dealer. Keith King
As far as I am aware, the pedal test to retrieve codes should work on the Corsa D, although I have not tried this myself.
The indicator lamp of a car with a spanner is not a service light, but rather a malfunction indicator lamp indicating there is a problem with the engine electronics and possibly the immobiliser system. This is different from the standard EML, which has the generic engine symbol. The EML will show if any of the engine sensors are faulty and this is the one which it should be possible to read using the pedal test.
Autodata informs me that there was a common problem with the Corsa D which involved a poor connection between the throttle pedal position sensor and the loom. For this reason, I would check the integrity of the connection at this point.
The glow plugs can be checked without removing them by using an ohmmeter. Disconnect the feed wire from across the top of the glow plugs, then check the readings with one terminal of the ohmmeter on the feed terminal of the glow plug and the other on the body of the glow plug. If the resistance is either very high or showing an open circuit, it indicates a fault. All glow plugs should give the same or very similar readings.
If nothing is found during the above tests, it would be advisable to get the codes read using a scanner. This should pinpoint the exact cause of the problem.