Ask The Guide

On the face of it, there’s a lot wrong with the way you’re being treated here. For a start, if the car has already had the software upgrade for the accelerator calibration and it’s still playing up, I’d suggest there’s still something wrong with the throttle-by-wire system in place. So it needs to be looked at. Your car was sold new with a five-year/130,000km warranty, so this is really LDV’s problem to fix provided you’ve had the car serviced correctly and haven’t exceeded that mileage.

As such, the dealership should not be in a position to charge you an hourly rate to fix a warranty issue. As for the old 'they all do that’ nonsense, that’s an example of a dealership treating its customers like idiots. Cars do not die when you take off, regardless of how hard you accelerate, and to suggest that they do is an insult to your intelligence.

So give this dealer the flick and either try another one or – better yet – go straight to the top and contact LDV Australia’s customer service division. Australian Consumer Law is pretty unambiguous on this stuff.

The answer is probably a pretty simple one in terms of what’s causing it. The warning light is to remind you to leave the car with Park engaged. So, the gear selector will have a tiny sensor or micro-switch that detects the selector in the Park position which is then conveyed to the car’s body computer. But if the sensor or switch is faulty or not adjusted correctly, the computer will think the car is not in Park and will light up the warning to alert you. The intermittent nature of the fault is what makes us think this is the case, combined with the fact that a quick flick of the T-bar button is enough to make the warning disappear.

So much for the cause, because the fix might be a bit more complicated. Depending on where the sensors and switches live, you may need to disassemble more of the car than would seem necessary to fix such a seemingly small problem. An auto electrician should be able to make sense of it.

When you say you have fuel, spark and air. How sure are you? These are not complicated engines and given all three of those things are present, the thing is kind of obliged to run. For instance, while you might be able to hear the fuel pump running (suggesting that fuel is being supplied) have you checked the fuel volume and pressure at the injector rail? Similarly, while there may be power at the coil packs, are the spark plugs actually doing their job?

Beyond that, you need to start looking for an alternative problem and, in engines like this one, you’d probably start with things like the crank-angle sensor which supplies information to the computer to allow the engine to fire. If this – or any other – sensor is dodgy, it can put a stop to play. An electronic scan might reveal more clues.

Conventional wisdom suggests you’ve either had a major failure of the transmission which has torn the casing open and allowed the oil out, or you’ve run over something that has punched a hole in the gearbox and produced the same results. But depending on the size of the puddle under the car, you might simply have been losing transmission fluid through a breather or missing or loose fill-plug for some time and only just now noticed it when the vehicle rolled to a stop.

The reason the car will not go into gear or produce drive is that it requires fluid (oil) to do so. If that oil escapes (hence the puddle) then those gear selection and drive functions are lost.

Don’t be tempted to top up the gearbox and try to drive home. The unit could fail on you again at any time (depending on the size of the leak) and you risk damaging further a transmission that is low on fluid. This one sounds like a warranty (transmission failure) or insurance (smashed transmission housing) claim.

I’m not sure what you mean by 'tracking lights’ but a check-engine light can be triggered by literally hundreds of things. Common causes for this light to illuminate include dud oxygen sensors, a fuel problem, ignition fault, low coolant level, low oil pressure, high temperature or any one of dozens of sensors around the engine and transmission having gone on the blink.

The best approach is to have the car electronically scanned. Modern cars are smart enough to know what’s caused the problem that triggered the check-engine light and will store this information to help a mechanic sort it out. By the way, technically speaking, a car with an illuminated check-engine light is unroadworthy. Also, continuing to drive with the light on could lead to more serious, more permanent damage to the engine or transmission.

I’ll also hazard a guess at what you mean by tracking lights’. Is it the small dashboard symbol that shows a car leaving a pair of curving tracks behind it? If so, you might have a problem with the car’s stability control, anti-lock brakes or some other crucial safety system. The problem there is that you won’t know for sure what’s wrong until you find yourself in an emergency situation and the car is suddenly not doing its best to help you.

This dashboard message refers to the level of security being offered by the car’s factory alarm system. Generally, you will see this message if you’ve somehow turned off the car’s interior motion sensors (that detects a break-in to the car). At this point, the car is set to Limited Guard mode. When you next start the car, the system should default back to the sensors turned on, and the car will offer the Full Guard message to let you know this has happened.

If the message was Full Alarm (rather than Full Guard) there’d probably be less confusion, but in this case the translation to English from Swedish seems a bit off.

This is an increasingly common complaint among car owners who are finding that modern driver safety aids such as autonomous emergency braking and lane-keeping assistance programs are too sensitive and don’t take into account the whole picture at the time. Examples include shrubs in a driveway causing the emergency braking to activate, and lane-keeping assistance trying to maintain a car in the centre of its lane despite a looming wide-load on a truck next to it.

I’m not sure what the solution is. But we can only hope that as cars get better and these programs more sophisticated, the errors won’t be as common. But while ever this tech relies on a computer and an algorithm, it will be doomed to (sometimes) fail. This is one of the reasons completely self-driving cars are not yet a reality on our roads; the tech is simply not foolproof yet.

Meantime, covering your car’s cameras with tape might put a stop to the false alarms, but it might also create new problems as the computer searches in vain for the camera’s input. And your concerns about insurance hassles are well founded, too. It’s not hard to imagine the owner of a car with disabled safety features being refused cover in the event of a crash.

This hasn’t surfaced as a common problem, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening in some instances. The HiAce rear axle should have seals on the actual differential centre as well as each axle. If these are failing continuously, there are a number of possibilities.

The first is that there’s something bent or damaged that is placing undue force or damaging the seal, causing it to fail prematurely. The second is that the seal (and its replacements) are from a dud batch of seals with either poor manufacturing tolerances or a flaw in the material from which they’re made. The third culprit would be a blocked differential breather which is not allowing the pressure inside the housing escape, and that pressure is causing the oil to be pushed out past the seals.

According to the official test, the Arkana has a combined (city and highway) consumption figure of 6.0 litres per 100km which is pretty decent for this type and size of vehicle. CarsGuide’s road test, however, showed that, like the vast majority of cars out there, the Renault will use a bit more than that in the real world. A mix of country, city and suburban work as well as a helping of highway and motorway driving netted a figure of 7.5 litres per 100km. Still pretty good, to be honest.

The other factor when considering running costs is the type of fuel required. Here, again, the Arkana scores well as it will happily run on the cheaper 91-octane fuel rather than the premium stuff.

There wasn’t a recall for this problem on this model, but there was a service bulletin (like a recall but for a non-safety related issue). The problem was the same as yours; examples of this diesel engine were overheating. The cause was deemed to be a loss of coolant and was related to poor cylinder-head gasket sealing. In turn, that was deemed to be the result of a too-rough metal surface on the cylinder block where it joined the cylinder head and sandwiched the gasket.

Mitsubishi introduced measures such as a different coolant concentration, a different radiator cap and an ECU that gave more warning to the driver. But none of these things actually fixed the issue with the head gasket and the metal surfaces. In fact, it wasn’t until 2014 production that Mitsubishi changed the machining process on the production line to give a smoother head-gasket sealing surface which solved the problem for good.

It seems that some engines had problems while other simply did not. Hard use such as towing heavy loads or driving at sustained high speeds made the problem more likely to surface.