Ask The Guide

If the car still selects gears, then the problem is probably not within the gearbox itself. Instead, it’s likely to be play, or looseness, that has developed in the shift mechanism. The gearstick in a car is linked to the actual gearbox either by a series of levers or cables. The motion of the gearstick is transferred via those linkages or cables to the internal workings of the transmission and the gearshift is made. If free-play or looseness develops in these linkages or cables, or the pivot of the gearstick itself, then the sloppiness you’re feeling can occur.

The fix is to replace the worn bushes or bearings that these linkages ride on, thereby removing the free-play. It can be a fairly simple job in some cases, but other times the worn parts are deeper within the mechanical bits and need extra dismantling to reach. That’s when the job can become more expensive.

You can pay a lot for an aftermarket bull-bar and you can choose features such as winch-compatibility and tow-points so it pays to know exactly what you’re looking for in a bull-bar. The other thing to ensure is that the bar you choose is compatible with the air-bags on your vehicle. That’s one thing you can be assured of with the Mitsubishi factory bar, but it’s not a given with some aftermarket units. Proper air-bag deployment is something you can’t gamble with, so that would be the first question to ask of any aftermarket bull-bar supplier.

Not sure where you heard that rumour, but it’s definitely not true. Car makers have to warrant the whole of a brand-new vehicle against any faults caused by either poor workmanship or faulty parts used to create the vehicle. The only way a manufacturer might be able to avoid that is if the vehicle had been modified and that modification could be shown to have caused the fault. An example would be where the car’s owner modified the wiring to add extra lights and had managed to damage the car’s wiring in the process, leading to an electrical failure. The other caveat is that you need to maintain a new vehicle according to the manufacturer’s official schedule. Without this preventative maintenance, a car company can be within its rights to deny a warranty claim. But again, it would need to be shown that the lack of maintenance was the cause of the particular failure.

Perhaps the rumour-mill created this as an incorrect response to the fact that MG in Australia warrants its conventionally-powered cars for seven years/unlimited kilometres while the brand’s hybrid and fully-electric models carry just a five-year/unlimited kilometre warranty. To balance that, MG hybrids and EVs carry an eight-year/160,000km warranty on the actual battery unit.

ACT law requires a licensed used-car dealer to offer a warranty of three months or 5000km warranty on used passenger vehicles which are less than 10 years old or have travelled less than 160,000km. So regardless of the mileage your car has covered, it’s already 12 years old if you bought it last year. Unfortunately, that really means you’re not covered and the car-yard you bought it from has – on the surface – no legal obligation to compensate you whatsoever.

Australian Consumer Law can over-ride state and territory warranty laws, but this might only apply if you could prove that the vehicle was of unmerchantable quality, not fit for purpose or had existing faults that weren’t disclosed to you at the time of purchase. None of this would be easy to prove after eight months of ownership. You could elect to have the car independently inspected to determine the cause of the failure, but even this may not be conclusive. You’d also need to be able to prove that you maintained and serviced the car correctly for the time you’ve owned it. The first step would be to contact the car-yard and ask for help on a goodwill basis. I wouldn’t be holding my breath, however.

Mazda’s SUV range (CX-5 and CX-8) are popular with their owners and have a good reputation in the trade. Crucially, they’re also available with a turbo-diesel engine, so they fit your criteria on that basis. We’d also suggest you take a good look at the South Korean brands’ offerings (Hyundai and Kia) as these are also highly rated by the trade and those companies have been involved with small-capacity diesel engines for decades, so the technology is pretty well sorted.

It’s interesting that you’ve had a good run from your Holden Captiva as that is far from the experience of many owners and former owners of this particular vehicle. As the Captiva ages it is very likely to start giving trouble, so the best advice is to trade up to a newer vehicle sooner rather than later.

Although both the Ford Focus from 2004 and 2009 were both offered with a two-litre petrol engine, those engines were actually different in terms of their mechanical specification. With that in mid, it’s very unlikely that the clutch from the earlier car would be compatible with the later version. A quick search also revealed that the replacement clutch kits for each version of the Focus you’re dealing with carry a different part number which is a pretty good indication that there are differences between the two.

The hard starting and loss of power sound to me like a problem with the fuel pick-up or the fuel pump. In your Hyundai, the fuel filter is part of the pump assembly and lives in the actual fuel tank. Replacing the filter involves removing the pump from the tank, changing the filter and then replacing the whole assembly into the tank. If a hose has been crimped or an air leak introduced into this system, the pump may not be able to supply the engine with all the fuel it needs. A cold start-up is when an engine will suffer from this leak, while tight turns on a roundabout could be enough to starve the engine of fuel if the pick-up (the hose that dips into the petrol in the tank) isn’t in the right position inside the tank. The fact that these problems started when the car received a new fuel filter is a pretty good clue that something was not quite right when the car was put back together. I’d be going back to the workshop that fitted the filter, explaining the problem and giving the shop the opportunity to put things right.

The noise in your steering system is almost certainly due to a well known problem with these cars. The electrically-assisted steering system in your car uses a rubber coupling which can deteriorate over time. When this happens, a click or clunk can be heard. The solution is to have the rubber coupling replaced. Because the problem didn’t cause steering failure, Hyundai didn’t issue a recall for this, but a batch of earlier i30s (some cars built in 2007 and 2008) did have a steering coupling that could fail completely, leading to a loss of steering., These were recalled by Hyundai as part of a safety recall back in 2014.

The stop-start function on modern cars works according to a variety of protocols. Fundamentally, if the car’s battery can cope with not having the engine running, then it will trigger the fuel-saving measure when the car is stationary. But, if the battery is low (you’ve recently been running in electric-only mode, for instance) or you have the car’s lights or air-conditioning switched on and the stereo blaring, then the car may decide that it needs to keep the engine running to keep those systems running. If that’s the case, the stop-start function will be over-ruled.

This is a very common complaint among owners of Holdens of this era. If you’ve checked all the likely places for water to enter, then you have to start thinking laterally. Does the car have an aftermarket of dealer-fitted rear spoiler? The mounting holes of these can be great places for water to enter the boot. But believe it or not, this series of full-sized Holdens was also susceptible to a manufacturing glitch where the rear quarter-light windows weren’t sealed properly. Water can, apparently, enter here and find it’s way into the boot. It sounds crazy, but I’m assured it’s a thing with these cars.

The problem you have is that the car was already nine months out of warranty when the problem was first noticed. Even though the pump did not require replacement right there and then, if a leak has started, then the pump is damaged or worn and will eventually need replacement. There’s also a distinct probability that the leak had started weeks before it was spotted by your service workshop, so it may have been even closer to the warranty period when the problem first occurred.

I’m with you on this one; 39,000km is not good enough for a modern car to begin to require major replacement parts like a water pump. Rather than go through your dealership, consider contacting Toyota Australia’s customer service division directly and stating your case. Interestingly, since 2019, Toyota has offered a five-year warranty on its new cars and perhaps, if you’ve been a repeat customer or always had your Kluger serviced at a Toyota dealership, then you might find Toyota will help out even to the extent of providing the pump for you to have installed at your expense. If you don’t ask, you won’t get.