Holden SUV Range

A quick test will tell you whether the alternator is sending charge to the battery. If it isn’t, then you need to start checking the wiring and things like the whether the car is earthed properly. Perhaps there’s a blown fuse of circuit breaker that is preventing the flow of charge from the alternator to the battery.

If the alternator is, in fact, charging the battery when the engine is running, then you’re looking for a problem such as an aftermarket alarm or a boot light or some other electrical gremlin that is draining the battery overnight. It would also be worth checking that the new battery and alternator for correct operation and capacity. It wouldn’t be the first time a brand-new component has been faulty, fitted to a car and then confounded the mechanic responsible.

You have a few choices here, but all of them involve replacing the broken handles rather than trying to fix them. Your first option is to find one of the remaining Holden dealers out there and order genuine replacements. The second is to find a parts recycler (a wrecking yard as they were once known) and harvest a set of door handles from a wrecked Captiva.

The other option is to find an online seller with brand-new or second-hand replacements (lots of parts recyclers also have online stores). You can order them and have them delivered, usually within a few days if it’s an Australian-based seller. Just remember to specify the handles that incorporate the keyless-entry button.

Regardless of whether you use an additive, a car’s Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) will still need to be cleaned (or regenerated) periodically as soot builds up in it. Short trips where the engine doesn’t get a chance to warm up properly, as well as extended periods of idling in traffic and stop-start running will all hasten this requirement.

In the case of the Captiva diesel, the best way to manually force a regeneration is to put aside an hour and go for a decent drive. The advice from Holden in the day was to travel at more than 50km/h and at more than 2000rpm (which may mean locking the car out of overdrive) for a minimum of 25 minutes. During this process, you should not allow the speed or revs to fall below those two figures which suggests finding a decent strip of freeway to carry out this process. You should also not turn off the engine at any point in this procedure.

The broad idea is to get the engine and exhaust hot enough for the filter to regenerate and clean itself. Experience suggests a couple of attempts may be needed to get this to happen as it should, and in fact, the car’s computer will give you several chances to produce the desired effect before the workshop beckons.

If, after 100km of this type of treatment, the DPF light on the dashboard hasn’t disappeared, the solution is a trip to a workshop to have the filter investigated and, potentially, hand-cleaned. Also, a mechanic can initiate a DPF regeneration via a scanning tool.