Let’s start with the basics here. Is your vehicle a petrol- or diesel-engined Rodeo? If it’s the former, you may have disturbed the wiring when changing the filter. So go back and check all the connections. If you can’t hear the pump whirring when you turn on the ignition, then you either have a fuse or wiring problem or the pump itself has died.

It’s pretty common for this to happen and most electric fuel pumps have a lifespan of something like 100,000km. But this can be a lot shorter if the car has ever been filled with contaminated fuel.

If your Rodeo is a diesel, there’s a chance it will need to be primed before it will restart after a filter change. That is, it needs to have any air in the fuel system removed before it will run. Locate the fuel filter in the engine bay, and you should see a small plunger at the top. With everything refitted, you can manually push on this plunger to prime the pump and remove any air. All things being equal, the engine should then start and run.

Speaking of back to basics, make sure you haven’t installed the new fuel filter the wrong way around. These only flow in one direction and installing it backwards will not allow the fuel to flow from the tank to the engine.

Something, somewhere in the vehicle (probably the driveline) is causing the car to go into what’s called limp-home mode. This is designed to limit speed and power and, therefore, protect the vehicle from further damage due to the original problem.

You may have a fuel problem or an exhaust problem or maybe there’s something wrong with the emissions control system, or even a simple electrical sensor that’s faulty. The point being that you won’t know what the actual problem is until you scan the vehicle to see what the computer has seen going wrong. Until then, you’re just guessing and the vehicle will continue to go into limp-home mode. These problems don’t fix themselves.

The problem here could literally be a thousand different things. You may have a different fuel problem than simply a blocked filter (injectors, pumps etc) or you might even be looking at an electrical or electronic problem with a sensor or computer module. What you need to do is have the vehicle electronically scanned to see if the on-bord computer has logged any problems that will guide the mechanic to the cause.

The other thing you could try would be to run the car on LPG and see what happens. If it runs perfectly on LPG but still struggles on petrol, you’d be very tempted to think the problem is indeed in the petrol fuel system.