WHY IS THE BOOT OF MY VAUXHALL CORSA JAMMED SHUT?

Q The boot lid of my 2016 Vauxhall Corsa will not unlock. The Vauxhall dealer who supplied the car says a diagnostic investigation costing £120 is needed to look into the problem. The cost of any repair work will be extra. Is there a cheaper option, or might my husband perform a DIY fix? – IJ

A Firstly, I have to say that I think it is an absolute swizz that your dealer wants £120 to diagnose the job – and then will charge extra to replace the part. Sadly, this kind of behaviour is far from the exception to the rule these days; some jobs take only 10-15 minutes to diagnose, but many dealers still see fit to charge for such investigations at a full hour’s labour, sometimes even more.

I’d take my business elsewhere. This is the kind of job a local garage can probably do with its eyes closed – and you’ll save yourself a packet.

For one thing, good local garages only tend to bill for the time they spend on the car – so you shouldn’t pay over the odds for diagnosis. And, of course, their labour rate will be lower than that of the main dealer.

Can your husband DIY it? Possibly, depending on how handy he is with a spanner. The chances are the fault lies with the boot handle microswitch. These microswitches tend to fail quite often; this is a fairly common fault on this generation of Corsa.

He’ll have to remove the boot lid trim and test the switch using a multimeter; if it’s faulty, it’s simple to switch it for a new one.

The part itself is around £20 and won’t take long to fit. And if he doesn’t feel confident, I reckon a good independent garage could probably effect a repair for less than the cost of the main dealer’s diagnostic fee. And if the fault lies elsewhere, they’ll probably charge you less than the dealer would to trace the fault.

In the meantime, if you need to open the boot lid in an emergency, you can do so using a little button on the latch itself. You’ll have to crawl into the boot, but from there, if you look at the latch at the back end of the boot floor, you’ll find the little button at the bottom of the latch, on the left-hand side as you look at it.

iThe Vauxhall Corsa of a certain age has a weakness in the area of microswitches