450 Interior Handle Cable

If your internal door release suddenly decides to go all sticky one day, jam you in the car, stick open so you can’t close the door because the latch won’t re-lock, generally point itself at the inside of the car instead of flipping back flush to the door trim, then the cable between the door release and the latch is probably buggered.

This is not too difficult to replace although a bit more involved than it really needs to be.

First, obtain a new cable from smart, part number: Q 000 1973 V005 000000 “bowden cable”. These are identical for left and right sides of the car.

These are about £16 from smart at the time of writing, so don’t be tempted to pay £14 plus postage for a second hand one off Ebay as I nearly did without checking the new price first.

Cable Removal

You need to remove both the inner door card and the outer door panel.

Remove the door latching mechanism by removing the 3 Torx bolts…

…and the two above and below the latch itself on the back edge of the door.

Pull the entire latch mechanism out and flip it over to access the back. The cable releases easily by prying the outer sheath from the fork shaped stop with a screwdriver then twisting the cable end out of the latch lever.

The cable routes through the inside of the door. Release it from the clips along the edge of the plastic. Be careful as the electric wiring loom runs through these clips too.

Now the inner door handle will just hang open as there’s no spring pressure on the other end of the cable.

Get some fine nose pliers on to the cable, twist the cable to line up with the slot in the handle and pull down to get the cable out of the handle.

The outer sheath of the cable slots into the inner shell of the handle, here’s a photo of the handle with cable out…

Tada!

Fit the new cable.

The outer sheath of the cable has a curved guide, when you slide in the new cable this guide needs to point down so the cable routes down through the door as in the earlier photo, the sides are squared off so this isn’t too difficult.

Be gentle with this plastic guide, my old one came out broke, though as you can see it had a tough life so it may already have been broken.

Now just reassemble everything in reverse. Fine nose pliers to get the ball shaped cable stop back into the internal handle.

Route the cable through the door to the latch and push it into the door trim clips. Twist the cable end back into the latch lever and push the outer sheath into the forked stop. Re-assemble the latch back into the door frame, be careful to line the bolt heads up with the marks they left on the latch so everything lines up and the door closes cleanly. Now test your release, should have a nice clean operation.

If you’re happy that it lines up and releases the latch, re-fit the door panels and everything else you took off.

Give the external door release cables a bit of maintenance while you have everything disassembled.