Welcome to BamfordRose and another forum chat. This week it’s a problem that I saw asked on a forum and by coincidence we had one of our customers come in with exactly the same issue. It’s how do I get into my boot when the switch won’t work? Well basically it’s because the actuator has failed. So, here’s a picture of the actuator on the table on its own, away from the car. And then there’s the picture of the actuator actually bolted into the boot with… You can see it because the trim is removed.

So, if you press the little nipple on the boot and it won’t release, you press the button on the fob, hold it, won’t release or press the button in the center console, flit a little switch then it won’t release. Then probably it’s the actuator itself which has failed and you need to replace it. Cheap enough. I mean about 50 or so quid. And the only problem is how do you get the boot open to replace it.

So, got some pictures here of the easiest way to do it. If you crawl in from the back of the driver seat and reach over, stretch over, to the back of the parcel shelf, you need to detach the shelf, so you can just bend it down a bit. And then you can see the picture where we just peel back that trim from each of the plugs at the bottom of the risk screen there. So, get your hand behind that, trim and give it a good tug and pull it down. You’ll then, once you’ve pulled that down, get line of sight through that little pull handle that you can see on the picture there. Pull that manual handle and then the boot will open.

So, it can easily be done from crawling through to the back of the car, pushing down the partial shelf, pulling out the trim plugs and getting line-of-sight so you can put your hand through and pull that cord. It certainly took no more than two minutes. So, don’t panic. Easy at home fix and the actuator is cheap. There’s certainly no real need if you didn’t want to visit a garage to solve that problem.