Excessive coolant usage & car steaming up.

[grand-one]

Need to get the car into a garage tomorrow. It has started using some coolant and the air con now only pumps steam onto the windscreen causing it to fog up once the car has gotten warm. Any ideas as to the cause? Thought a possible head gasket issue but the engine runs sweet enough, so maybe with the air con itself?

Car is an Audi A6 2.8 petrol and has behaved brilliantly for the last 200K!

Any ideas before I commit it to the local garage?

[GreenV8S]

If you can smell antifreeze inside the car then I'd say a leaking heater matrix was the most likely suspect.

[Brink]

GreenV8S said:

If you can smell antifreeze inside the car then I'd say a leaking heater matrix was the most likely suspect.

[grand-one]

Yep, turned out the heater matrix has gone. Apparently Audi start with a heater matrix and build a car around it. Thus meaning the dash / steering wheel / airbags may have to come out to change it. Hmmm, small bill there then......

[regroo]

grand-one said:

Yep, turned out the heater matrix has gone. Apparently Audi start with a heater matrix and build a car around it. Thus meaning the dash / steering wheel / airbags may have to come out to change it. Hmmm, small bill there then......

We had Company Passats. It is a common Audi fault. See if they will do anything with a care program?

IIRC it was about £1500 to sort.