Ask The Guide

Definitely, and what you’re doing is exercising what’s called mechanical sympathy, and it’s a dying art, I’m afraid.

When you consider the forces involved in shifting a car from Neutral to Drive or Reverse, it’s easy to understand that doing so while the engine is revving higher than idle is asking for trouble. Extra revs mean extra forces on all those hydraulic and mechanical bits that make up an automatic transmission. It’s a bit like the difference between taking off normally in a manual car versus revving the engine up and dumping the clutch to make a fast getaway. Yes, it will leave the green light faster, but you’ve just multiplied all the forces trying to tear the transmission apart.

A slightly higher idle shouldn’t make much difference, but the golden rule is to only ever select a gear when the engine is idling at its normal rpm. The good news is that modern engine management means a cold-started engine should only idle higher for handful of seconds, meaning you don’t have to wait long before selecting your gear and taking off.

By the way, a healthy transmission shouldn’t clunk into gear either; the gear-selection process should be swift and all but silent.

While some cars are known lemons and should be avoided at all costs, the vast majority of cars and utes are okay as second-hand buys provided they’ve been serviced and maintained properly. And that goes for all makes and models, not just the VW Amarok. The point being that a well-maintained Amarok might be fine with 200,000km on board, while a neglected one will be junk by the time it has covered half that distance.

That said, the current crop of modern turbo-diesel dual-cab utes are mostly tuned pretty highly which means that by 200,000km or so, many of them will be showing a bit of wear. This might be most apparent in the intake system, the turbocharger, emission systems, transmissions and many other hard-working parts. Again, it all depends on how they’ve been maintained and how they’ve been used. I’d be budgeting for at least some repairs on an Amarok with that many kilometres under its belt. At which point, of course, it all comes down to the purchase price.

Taking your car to a Hyundai dealer is a fabulous idea because you might just find that this will turn into a warranty claim where Hyundai foots the bill and not you. Theoretically, your car could still be covered by its original five-year warranty (depending on what date it was sold new) but some Hyundai cars were also covered by extra warranty and extended drivetrain warranties. This is what you need to establish, but a Hyundai dealer will be able to give you the answer.

Modern cars like the Skoda have sealed cooling systems which means they shouldn’t need regular top-ups. As the engine heats up and the coolant expands, any excess coolant is captured by an overflow tank which stores the coolant and then allows it to be sucked back into the engine’s cooling system as the car cools down. This is all perfectly normal. All of which means that if you have coolant disappearing, then there’s a leak somewhere, but don’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that the radiator is at fault.

The problem could be one of many things, including a failed radiator hose or some other piece of critical plumbing, a faulty water pump, cracked cylinder head, blown head gasket, broken overflow tank, failed radiator cap, split cylinder bore, leaking heater matrix and more. The dealership should be able to tackle this as a warranty job and will probably pressurise the cooling system and see where, if anywhere, coolant starts to appear where it shouldn’t.

Safety gear such as seat-belt warnings don’t usually have an on-off button, as they need to operate all the time in the interests of safety. But having them go off when there’s nobody in the back seat is just annoying.

Are your kids leaving their school bags or anything else on the seat when they leave the vehicle? Sometimes a bag of groceries or a small suitcase heavy enough can make the vehicle think there’s a human backside on the seat and, if the seat-belt isn’t done up, will sound the alert. If not, you’re probably looking at a problem with the sensor that triggers the warning. Either way, the car thinks the seat is occupied when it’s not.

This problem should be covered by your new-car warranty, so let the dealer sort it out. In the meantime, you might be able to silence the warning by clipping the seat-belts into their correct buckles, even if there’s nobody in those seats.

If you’ve just bought a new car, it’s very important to discover what recalls have been issued for it over the years and whether those fixes have been attended to.

My list of recalls for this model Hyundai iX35 includes one for a seat-belt tensioner cable that was not attached properly, one for an air-bag retention nut that was incorrectly torqued and could cause the air-bag to deploy incorrectly, one for a transmission cooler hose problem on automatic versions, one for a potential fuel hose leak and a fifth recall for a potential engine oil leak on the 2.4-litre petrol variant.

Unless your engine is overheating very quickly and then miraculously cooling instantly, I’d say there’s a problem with either the temperature gauge itself or the sender/sensor unit that controls it.

An auto electrician will be able to test the gauge and its sensor and tell you what’s happening. Scanning the vehicle electronically might also reveal the cause as the onboard computer may have logged this odd reading as a fault code.

By which, I assume you mean that the level on the engine-oil dipstick is rising, rather than falling slowly with time and kilometres. This is actually a bit more common than you might think and affects modern turbo-diesel vehicles with DPF filters.

In a nutshell, what’s happening is the vehicle is trying to 'burn-off' or clean its DPF filter. But in many cases, the engine and exhaust system never get hot enough for this to occur, so the computer instructs the fuel injection to squirt some extra fuel into the engine to get everything hot enough for a DPF burn. Inevitably, some of this extra fuel gets past the piston rings, into the engine oil and there you have the increase on the dipstick.

The problem is that this fuel actually dilutes the lubricating oil and suddenly, your engine is not getting all the protection it needs from the oil. The whole situation is a result of the engine not reaching a high enough temperature in everyday use, so the best advice is to make sure you take the ute for a 30 or 40 minute drive at highways speeds at least a couple of times a month. That will allow the DPF to burn off properly and you shouldn’t have the problem recurring.

For now, though, an oil change is good insurance against that oil dilution. And keep an eye on the level on the dipstick for future reference.

In the old days, you’d probably be on the right track, but as a more modern car, your Chery doesn’t have a carburettor, it has electronic fuel-injection. But the symptoms align pretty neatly with a very common problem for fuel-injected cars; an electric fuel pump that has given up the ghost.

When that happens, there’s no way for the fuel to get from the tank to the engine and, as a result, the car simply won’t start. Pumps can fail suddenly and for no apparent reason, leaving you stranded where ever you happen to be.

I’d say about ten years is a pretty good innings for a fuel pump, so that’s where I’d start looking. Try this: When you turn the ignition on, you should be able to hear a faint buzz or hum as the pump starts taking petrol to the engine. If there’s no such noise, that’s another clue that the pump has died.

Of course, it could be something else – electrical, perhaps a fuse – but the fuel pump is a great place to start searching for the cause.

There are many potential causes for this, but any time a car doesn’t want to follow a straight line by itself, you have a potentially very dangerous machine on your hands. You could be looking at a car with problems including (but not limited to) a dragging or poorly adjusted brake, contaminated brake pad/shoes, misaligned suspension geometry, an incorrectly inflated tyre, a damaged tyre, worn suspension components, worn steering components, a bent frame, bent wheel rim, and any, many more.

Have the vehicle checked out (a tyre and suspension specialist would be a good place to start) and see where that leads. The problem could be simple or quite complex, but whatever it is, it needs to be fixed before you drive any farther. If the car pulls to one side in normal driving, imagine what it might do if you had to perform an emergency stop.