Today I did two of the things I did yesterday: Stomping Grounds for a latte and a visit to Harbor Freight. The Harbor Freight trip was to get a set of 3/8″ drive metric deep sockets. I needed just one size, 13mm, but they only sell sets, so now I’ve got a set of 10 that range from 10mm to 21mm.
I bought a Hatch Pop Kit from ECS Tuning so I could open the hatch with a press of a button on the fob, and today was install day. First you remove the old struts, one at a time, but before you do that you have to prop up the hatch because even with just one strut removed the hatch will sag to close. It was a straight forward job and took all of 20 minutes to swap the struts. Closing the hatch now takes a heavier hand to shut it, but the magic will be in the free lift up.
Here is where it would have paid to read the whole page before ordering. Down in the notes section was “Coding may be required— To determine if coding is needed, hold your hatch pop button on your key fob and if you hear the hatch latch operating you DO NOT NEED CODING. Please reference our installation PDF for coding instructions as needed.” I thought I heard the latch, but the hatch did not raise under the power of the new struts. So to code this, I need to buy a Volkswagen Auto Group-specific OBDII scanner and some software too.
To get the functionality I wanted from the $100 original purchase, I have to spend another $40 +shipping and $25 for a month of the software… I’m almost leaning toward returning the Hatch Pop Kit; I’m not really liking the force required to close the hatch. I’ll give it a week.
