Ask The Guide

Your mechanic is right in deciding that a leak between the engine and gearbox will need the two components to be split to access the problem. Whatever it turns out to be. It could be a broken torque converter which would be expensive, or a simple oil seal which may cost just a few dollars. Either way, though, the labour involved in fixing even that cheap oil seal is going to make this an expensive operation.

Sometimes, you just have to let it go and cut your losses on a car that is starting to become worn out. To be honest, the Holden Captiva was not the most reliable or durable car ever made and many owners have discovered the hard way that this Holden badged car was actually a Daewoo, and not a good Daewoo at that.

With fuel consumption like that and a smelly, fuming engine, it’s a fair chance that there’s something amiss in the fuelling system. This could be anything from worn injectors to a faulty injection pump, but could also be a simple thing like a dud coolant-temperature sensor or oxygen sensor in the exhaust system that is telling lies to the computer than controls the engine and throwing the engine’s tune way out of whack.

Have the vehicle electronically scanned to see what fault codes are thrown up. And don’t be surprised if the problem is actually something within the ignition system rather than the fuel-injection. Or both.

There’s a huge range of towing limits for the RAV4 thanks to the sheer number of model variants. In simple terms, the non-hybrid two-wheel-drive versions can tow a braked trailer of 800kg while a two-wheel-drive hybrid RAV4 can only cope with 480kg. Which means that if you want a RAV4 for towing, you’re best to look at any of the all-wheel-drive versions (hybrid or non-hybrid) which have a braked towing limit of 1500kg.

Of course, those figures are for braked trailers, while your question was for a trailer with no braking of its own. In that case, the two-wheel-drive RAV4’s limit stays at 480kg, while the all-wheel-drive’s limit falls to 750kg.

Gross Combined Mass (the total weight of the vehicle, the trailer and anything being carried including passengers, fuel, luggage and accessories) meantime, is harder to find and you need to resort to the owner’s manual (which is a problem if you haven’t bought the car yet). In any case, the two-wheel-drive RAV4’s GCM is 2665kg, while the all-wheel-drive’s GCM is 3730kg.

I’m unsure why this last piece of the puzzle is so difficult to find, but information like this should be more readily available as it’s a critical safety issue and something that many owners inadvertently get wrong with serious legal and insurance ramifications.

That price is towards the top end of things for this particular make and model, but within reason given the low kilometres on the odometer. Make sure it has a full service record as, even though it hasn’t been used much, it will still have needed proper servicing if it’s to remain reliable.

The high cost of complex replacement parts for relatively new vehicles is a trend that has been thriving lately. Once some cars are more than a handful of years old, a replacement engine or transmission can easily exceed the value of the whole car. At which point, owners have a tough decision to make; replace the car or pay up for the fix.

Aside from the financial aspects, you also have to decide how comfortable you are unloading a ticking time bomb on to a potentially unsuspecting buyer

It’s very likely that the two lights remaining on inside the car are enough to drain the battery over time. The real question is why a couple of random lights would stay on even when the vehicle is locked up overnight. Initial suspicions would involve the car’s body computer which controls many functions, including interior lighting.

An auto electrician is probably your best bet at this stage. But in the meantime, you can perform an electronic reset by disconnecting the car’s battery overnight. Sometimes this is enough to give the body computer a reality check and will return things to normal. But if it has happened once, it can happen again.

Not being able to match a vehicle’s official fuel consumption number is not just common, it’s something just about every owner discovers the hard way. That’s because the test that determines the number is a laboratory test, not a real world one. The test figure serves as a comparison between different makes and models, not a realistic expectation of fuel consumption.

However, the additions you’ve made to your car will all increase fuel consumption. A nudge bar and tow bar both add wight and a set of roof bars can easily add a litre of fuel to every 100km travelled thanks to increased aerodynamic drag. Even the GVM upgrade might make a difference, especially if it sits the vehicle up higher, affecting aerodynamics even further. If you’ve also fitted bigger tyres, fuel consumption will rise even more. To be honest, I reckon 10 litres per 100km is about right for this vehicle and matches most other vehicles of this type. Don’t forget, either, that an Isuzu MU-X is a much bigger, heavier vehicle than a Subaru Forester.

It’s important to differentiate smoke from water vapour when it comes to problems like this that may not be a problem at all. Given you’re also seeing water being emitted from the tailpipe, I’m tipping that this is all happening when you first start the car in the morning.

The fact is, this is perfectly normal behaviour from a conventional engine and is simply the engine doing what it does. The water and water vapour is visible on these colder mornings we’re experiencing right now in Victoria because the exhaust isn’t yet hot enough to turn it to steam (steam is actually invisible, water vapour is the white mist you can see). As the car warms up and the exhaust gets hotter, it will turn the water into steam and you won’t notice it.

But how does the water and vapour get into the exhaust in the first place? Believe it or not, water is a natural by-product of burning petrol in an engine. And until the engine and exhaust are hot enough to turn that water to steam, it’s visible to the naked eye. Which is when a lot of people start to get worried. But they needn’t, as it’s nothing to be concerned about.

The flip-side is if the tailpipe is actually emitting white or blue-ish smoke, at which point you potentially have a worn or damaged engine. This will happen regardless of whether the engine is hot or cold and it won’t go away once the engine is warmed up. If that’s the case, you need to have the engine compression tested by a mechanic as the first step towards finding the cause.

A modern engine like the one in your Nissan uses electronics to control the ratio of fuel and air, rather than a physical choke like older engines use. However, in order to control this ratio, the modern engine relies on a range of sensors dotted around the car to tell it what’s going on. Examples include a throttle-position sensor, ambient temperature sensor, coolant temperature sensor and many more. If just one of these sensors fails or starts relaying false information, all aspects of the car’s running (including its throttle action) can be compromised.

But before you start scanning the car and spending money to fix the engine flaring during gear changes, take a hard, critical look at what you’re doing with the pedals when shifting gears. If you don’t completely release the accelerator pedal during a gear change, or get your hand-foot co-ordination wrong, the engine will naturally flare during the shift. And because modern cars have a throttle-by-wire system, there’s not the same degree of feel and feedback through the accelerator pedal as some of us are used to. It sounds a bit obvious, but checking your driving style is the first step.

Folding metal convertible roofs are a pretty complex piece of gear, and there’s a lot that can go wrong with them. Often, however, it can be a really simple fix.

These folding tops feature lots of interlocks that will prevent the roof opening if the car thinks there’s something amiss. That could be something like a switch that prevents opening if the windows haven’t wound themselves down a few millimetres for clearance. In some cars there’s also a switch that tells the car if the main clasp has been unfastened, and in some cases there’s another that reports back to the car that the hand-brake is, indeed, applied and it’s safe to begin lowering the roof.

These protocols and protections vary from car to car, but in the case of, say, the park-brake switch. The problem can be as simple as a sticky switch in the park-brake assembly that is not triggering. And without that tiny piece of information, the car will decide it’s not safe to open the roof. Check the dashboard to see if the park-brake warning light illuminates when you apply the brake.

So start with all those little switches and clips and make sure the correct information is getting to the computer. If that doesn’t throw up a solution, you need to start investigating things like the electric motor and solenoids that physically operate the roof.