Ask The Guide

Car makers will sometimes help out with such problems provided the car has been serviced correctly and not abused throughout its life. I agree that 40,000km is not a reasonable expectation for a modern automatic transmission, so I’d be contacting Hyundai Australia’s customer service division to see if anything can be done. Experience tells me that Hyundai takes its obligations in this area pretty seriously, so you may be offered some help with the cost of repairs.

You could also have the transmission inspected to see what went wrong (your state motoring club is a good place to start for independent inspections like this one) as this information might be very useful if you decide to take the matter further. The ACCC would be the final step in this process, and Australian Consumer Law deals with what is fit for purpose and what is not.

The reason for deleting a temperature gauge is the same as for any other time a manufacturer deletes equipment; to save money. While your Crafter doesn’t have a temperature gauge per se, it will have a warning light that will illuminate if the temperature starts to rise above normal. At which point, the onus is on you to stop and find the problem, or risk blowing the engine up. The problem with these light is that the damage is sometimes already done by the time the light flickers on, while an actual gauge might have given you more warning that there was a problem.

Car makers get away with this sort of thing these days because cooling systems are quite reliable and don’t tend to give problems. Which is absolutely no comfort to anybody who has had a catastrophic engine melt-down.

Fitting an aftermarket temperature gauge in the old days was simple because there was no computer control of the car and its driveline. You simply found a convenient, threaded spot in the cylinder head or block and screwed a temperature gauge sender into it, mounted the gauge in the cabin where you could see it easily and job done. That doesn’t apply nowadays as to mount the sender, you’d probably need to disconnect some other intrinsic sensor that the computer relies on to make the car work properly.

But there is a modern solution. You can now buy a virtual gauge cluster that plugs into the on-board diagnostics port on modern cars. From that data, the cluster can determine all sorts of things (including engine temperature) and display that info on a small screen you mount in the cabin. You’ll also be able to display a heap of other information, including transmission temperature, air-fuel ratio and plenty more.

From memory, this model Triton featured a dual-mass flywheel. These were fitted to smooth out the engine and make gear changes quieter and smoother. But when they fail, they can produce the sort of symptoms you’re hearing.

Instead of a one piece, solid flywheel, the dual-mass unit is made in two parts with flexible couplings between them. These couplings absorb some of the shock of gear-shifts and engine vibrations, but when they’re worn out, the whole assembly becomes `loose’ and starts producing clunks and bangs. Replacing the flywheel is the only fix, but make sure you replace the clutch assembly at the same time. Some companies also offer a single-piece flywheel conversion for this vehicle to prevent the problem occurring again.

There are lots of potential causes for this sort of behaviour, starting with an alternator that is not working properly or even a body computer that is on the way out. But these symptoms are also a classic indication of a very simple problem; a poor earth somewhere on the car. A modern car has multiple earthing points, and if one is a bit sketchy, it can throw the whole car into chaos. Flickering lights and gauges and warning lights on the dashboard are classic indicators of a bad earth. If that’s the case here, an auto electrician should be able to chase down the fault and fix it permanently.

Before you do either of those things (replace the engine or the whole car) find out where the coolant is leaking from. You might find that it’s a simple case of a leaking hose or a worn out water pump that is causing the leak. If that’s the case, it could be fixed for a few hundred dollars or perhaps even less. Even if the problem is a rotted welch plug or a blown head gasket, the cost to fix it won’t be anywhere near as high as replacing the engine.

On top of that, you know the history of the engine you have, while a second-hand engine can be a bit of a lucky-dip: You might get a good one, you might not.

Nine litres per hundred kilometres seems like quite high fuel consumption for a car like a Cruze. But it really depends on how you drive it. A car that does exclusively city or suburban mileage, with lots of short runs, frequent cold starts and driver with a heavy right foot, could easily log that sort of consumption without there being anything wrong with the engine.

Meanwhile, driven carefully on the highway, that consumption could fall to as low as six litres per 100km, with a mix of highway and urban use using perhaps seven or eight litres per 100km. How and where a car is driven can have a huge effect on its fuel use. But if you’re still concerned, you can have the car scanned to make sure the emissions and all engine systems are in proper working order.

All the V6 Commodores from this era used much the same automatic transmission, a four-speed unit. While most of these units were identical, there were some detail differences across the years, so make sure you get the transmission with the correct number of electrical pins to be compatible with the wiring loom in your car.

It shouldn’t matter whether the replacement transmission came from a car with a floor-shift; it should still hook up to your column shift mechanism with no problems. You might have to swap a few bits and pieces involved in the shifter mechanism to mate it all, but you’ll be able to make it work.

Some of these east-west mounted V6s can be very difficult to access the rear bank of cylinders. A quality workshop manual will detail how to remove the rear rocker cover and spark plugs, and there are also some very good online tutorials you can tap into.

The fact that no error codes have been logged suggests that the spark plugs are at fault. In some cases, on-board computers can detect a bad ignition lead or coil, but will not recognise a dud spark plug. But oil leaks can also cause misfires if the oil gets into contact with the leads or spark plug contacts, too, so the leaks need to be fixed as well. The spark plug theory is also supported by the fact that the miss is occurring under load, which is when an ignition system is working its hardest.

I can understand why the crank angle sensor was the first thing to be changed. These often start to die and the first symptom is an engine that stops after running for a while. But you’re right to be sceptical about the timing chain as there’s a theory that says if the engine runs properly at all, then the issue won’t be anything fundamental. Which is to say, if the timing chain was stretched beyond the point at which the engine could function properly, it wouldn’t function properly at all, regardless of how long it had been running.

A good workshop should be able to scan the car’s computer. If the timing chain really is stretched, then the computer should have logged this as a problem. If not, then you’re looking for something else. Of course, what that something else is the million-dollar question. Don’t rule out basic things like a dirty fuel filter which can allow fuel to flow for a while before the rubbish in it clogs the flow after a few minutes running.

That said, if the engine can’t locate the correct signal from the camshaft (which is controlled by the timing chain) it will sometimes look for a stand-in signal somewhere else on the engine, allowing it to start but not run properly. An electronic scan is definitely the way forward.

It’s very unlikely a workshop would replace a component it fitted two years and 25,000km ago for free. Spare parts and repairs come with warranties, but generally not over that period of time or mileage. In any case, it sounds more like the clutch or flywheel has failed, rather than the master or slave clutch cylinders.

This model Ranger had a dual-mass flywheel designed to make for smoother operation, but the design cold also lead to premature clutch wear. When that happened, difficulty in selecting gears was one of the symptoms. Some owners when faced with this problem, converted their vehicles to a conventional single-mass flywheel to get around the problem in the future.