Ask The Guide

The recommended tyre pressures for that vehicle should be on a placard somewhere on the vehicle. Try inside the door jambs or the inside of the fuel-filler flap. However, that tyre size you’ve quoted suggests the vehicle could be on slightly wider wheels and tyres, at which point the placard’s recommendations go out the window somewhat.

So, using the rule of thumb for that size tyre on a vehicle like a Transporter, I’d start with 34 psi in the front tyres and 36 psi in the rear. For the metrically inclined, that’s 234 kPa in the front and 248 kPa in the rear. You could go up a few psi from there depending on the load you’re carrying, but that would be a pretty good starting point.

My friend, if I could find somebody to give me $5000 for a 2009 Captiva with a dodgy turbocharger, I’d be taking that deal in a heartbeat. The reality is that your car is worth about $5000 in decent working order, and nowhere near the $8000 you’ve calculated. That’s because you never really get back the money you spend in repairs; even if you spend $3000 on fixing a $5000 car, it will still only be worth about $5000. That’s the cruel reality of the used-car industry.

A cheaper, second-hand turbocharger is one way to go, but then you open yourself up to the risk of having bought, and paid to have installed, a turbo that is almost as worn out as the one that has failed on you. There’s no nice way to put this, but I’d be getting rid of that Captiva for the best price I could and not looking back.

The bad news, Andrea, is that your car is probably worth between $8000 and $11,000 and maybe even less as a trade-in. Certainly that figure will be less if you don’t fix the engine problem, so that’s your starting point for working out the mathematics of your situation.

The one thing you haven’t told me is whether the car is a V8 or a six-cylinder car. If it’s a V8, I reckon you’d be spot on the money with a lifter, rocker or valve-spring problem as these engines were notorious for these components wearing out in roughly the mileage you’ve noted (sometimes less). The good news is that it’s not a terribly involved or costly (relatively) fix.

If, however, the car is a V6, then you might be in a bit deeper. These engines were even more notorious for stretching their timing chains and that can lead to all sorts of engine noises as well as a check-engine light illuminating on the dashboard. This is a bigger, more expensive fix, too, and since a V6 Calais will be worth less in the first place, it might be better to simply replace the whole engine. There’s also the very strong possibility that the cost of repairs will simply not stack up against the value of the car.

All the cars you’ve nominated would be good choices and will give you some peace of mind because they all use conventional technology. That is to say, none of them in their most affordable, basic forms uses a turbocharger and none of them have a complex, dual-clutch transmission that has been so troublesome for Volkswagen and plenty of other manufacturers, too. At least, that’s if you stay clear of the Cerato GT and the i30 diesel and N-Line, because those variants do have a dual-clutch transmission. The Corolla? A CVT transmission, no matter what variant you buy, but it’s one of the better ones out there.

Yours is not the only voice calling out for a simpler, more reliable motoring experience, Ian. But any of the three makes and models you’ve named should do the job for you with minimal hassle. Neither of them offers up too much in the way of excitement, but as solid, dependable designs, they take some beating.

On the surface, it sounds like you have a hydraulic issue, either with the clutch’s master or slave cylinder. Bleeding the hydraulics for the clutch and removing any air from the system would be the first step in diagnosing this problem and may fix it. Often, though, a problem like this is a constant one, not one that crops up 30 minutes into a drive. Is the clutch pedal returning to its proper position after you’ve taken your foot off it? Is there any evidence of a leak around the clutch’s hydraulic plumbing?

Perhaps it’s the clutch itself - X-Trails are known to be a bit flimsy in this department - and a worn clutch could conceivably work fine when it’s cold and not so well when it’s hot. Perhaps it’s the throw-out bearing that’s jamming and needs greasing. Does the pedal go hard and require more pressure when the problem starts?

By the way, many owners remove the standard dual-mass flywheel and fit a more durable and reliable single-mass flywheel when they replace the clutch. It seems to be a more robust set-up than the stock Nissan system.

Buying the dealership’s paint protection certainly won’t do any harm, Sue, but it can be expensive as mark-ups are often huge for these products. You might do better with an aftermarket paint protection product from an independent specialist. But here’s the proposition I’d be putting to the dealer selling the car: If you can’t, in 2020, sell me a car that won’t fade or have its paint peel off, I fear we are wasting each other’s time. In fact, you could make the same argument for all those dealership add-ons, the upholstery protection, window tint and extended warranties.

Here’s another fact to consider: Regardless of whether you do or don’t buy the paint protection, the car’s finish is protected by the factory warranty just as the rest of the car is protected against faulty parts of poor assembly. Toyota even spells it out, saying that the factory warranty covers every part, panel or factory accessory. So you’ll only ever need the optional paint protection after the factory warranty has run out. Will a paint protection applied now be of any use five years – and a couple of hundred car-washes – down the track? That’s up to you.

It certainly would have had a service schedule book in the glove-box when it was delivered new, Denis. These books are important pieces of a car’s history as they show (or don’t show) that the car has been serviced correctly throughout its life. It’s one of the first things switched-on buyers look for in a second-hand car.

Unfortunately, because it’s a paper book and not a plastic or metal piece of the car, these books tend to go missing pretty often. Usually it’s just a simple case of somebody cleaning out the glove-box and throwing the book away or – more commonly – storing it somewhere safe where it will never be found again. If you want to take the more cynical view, `losing’ the service log-book is a great way of getting rid of evidence of shoddy servicing over the years.

You can approach a Subaru dealer to see if you can get a new log book, but even then it won’t show the car’s service history, only what’s been done since you obtained the new book. Even then, I’d grab a normal softcover exercise book that fits in the glove-box and use that to record each service or repair as time goes by. That will certainly be better than nothing to the person who eventually buys the car from you.

The model Kluger you are referring to uses an engine with the code-name 3MZ-FE. It uses a timing belt rather than a timing chain, so it requires periodic belt changes. This is especially important as the version of the engine fitted to your car is an interference type. That means that the pistons cannot move freely up and down if the camshafts aren’t also turning and, if the belt breaks while the engine is running, the ensuing collision between pistons and valves will probably destroy the engine.

Toyota recommends a timing-belt change every 150,000km which is actually pretty good compared with many other engines which require a new belt closer to every 100,000km or even less. The other piece of advice is to replace the belt tensioners and water pump while the engine is apart for the timing-belt replacement. It’s a lot cheaper to replace those items at that point, rather than having to open the engine up again down the track.

Even though the Journey was not a particularly popular model in Australia, I’m still a bit surprised that we don’t get this question a bit more often. Because the answer is a real doozie. While a lot of car-makers find that underbonnet space is too limited to place a battery, some resort to locating the battery either under a seat inside the car or in the boot. But not Dodge in the case of the Journey.

To access the battery in that case, you need to jack up the car, remove the front passenger’s wheel, peel back the plastic inner-guard and there, behind the corner of the front bumper, you will find the battery. For jump starting a car with a flat battery, Dodge placed a positive and negative terminal in the engine bay near the front-left suspension tower, and you’ll identify the positive by a small, red plastic cap with a `+’ moulded into it.

The HSVi plate on your car suggests it was ordered with some off-line upgrades when it was bought new. This was pretty common among those buying brand-new Holdens but for budget or company-policy reasons, couldn’t stretch to an actual HSV. The modifications were done by a sister company to HSV, called HSVindividual but the modifications themselves weren’t necessarily that same ones found on a HSV vehicle. In fact, many of the mods were pretty pedestrian, including cargo-liners for utes and even roo-bars for Holden models.

Other common modifications included sunroofs and bigger wheels and tyres and although nobody seems to have a list of what codes meant what modifications, any code that starts with `EW’ seems to relates to alloy wheels. So I’d imagine the EWT relates to that. As for FAT, I can’t find any reference to it on any information source; perhaps it has something to do with the Automatic Transmission?