I checked with Haval about this and discovered that the 12-volt battery is covered only by a 12-month/20,000km warranty. To be fair, that’s pretty normal, and the advice is to start any car at least every three to four weeks to keep some charge in the 12-volt system.

But the hybrid battery should not be subject to the same conditions, and is designed to be discharged and charged frequently as part of its normal use. Your Haval’s hybrid battery is covered by an eight-year/150,000km warranty, so there should be no problem with it being covered by the factory warranty if, in fact, it’s the cause of your problem.

You need to contact Haval Australia’s customer service department and take this further as a failed hybrid battery on a 2023 car should be Haval’s problem, not yours.

This is a relatively common annoyance for many owners of different makes and models, not just Havals. It’s caused by the automatic shut-off mechanism on the bowser’s nozzle thinking that the tank is full and it need to shut off to avoid overfilling and a spill.

It’s not actually a fault with your car (although some makes and models do seem worse than other) and is actually more to do with the bowser.

To get around it, you can either fill very slowly (as you’ve discovered) but you can also try inserting the nozzle by a different amount until you find the sweet spot where the fuel flows freely into the tank. The other trick picked up over the years is to insert the nozzle and then give it a quarter of a turn so that the fuel is hitting a different part of the car’s filler neck (which may not cause the same problem). You could also try a different service station to see if its nozzles alleviate the problem to some degree.

Car makers have responsibilities in this scenario, but so do car owners. In a nutshell, the law says that you have to give car maker ample opportunity to make things right when there’s a catastrophic failure like yours. And, to be honest, it sounds like that’s what’s happening here with Haval agreeing to replace the entire engine, presumably at its own cost as a warranty job.

The tricky part is making everybody happy and, sometimes, that is difficult if there are not enough loan cars to go around. Perhaps you could approach Haval Australia’s customer service department and suggest a hire car until yours is fixed, but in most cases, there’s no specific warranty-claim allowance for this.