2023 Isuzu MU-X Pricing and Specs

Generally speaking, a new-car warranty won’t cover items that are considered consumables. That normally includes the battery and tyres. However, if the tyres have become worn because of a fault with the vehicle’s suspension the situation might be different.

That depends, however, on whether the suspension fault was caused by poor materials or assembly at the factory, or because you hit a pothole at 100km/h or the suspension was in some other way damaged accidentally. If it’s the former, you might be able to convince Isuzu that the warranty claim on your suspension should also include new tyres. That said, given the tyres were already worn to the tune of 30,000km, don’t expect Isuzu to cover the full cost of brand new tyres.

Your best bet – if, indeed, the tyre damage is the result of a suspension problem within the warranty – is to contact Isuzu’s customer service department to see if you can work out a deal to fix the car and replace the tyres on a pro-rata basis.

This is an increasingly common complaint among car owners who are finding that modern driver safety aids such as autonomous emergency braking and lane-keeping assistance programs are too sensitive and don’t take into account the whole picture at the time. Examples include shrubs in a driveway causing the emergency braking to activate, and lane-keeping assistance trying to maintain a car in the centre of its lane despite a looming wide-load on a truck next to it.

I’m not sure what the solution is. But we can only hope that as cars get better and these programs more sophisticated, the errors won’t be as common. But while ever this tech relies on a computer and an algorithm, it will be doomed to (sometimes) fail. This is one of the reasons completely self-driving cars are not yet a reality on our roads; the tech is simply not foolproof yet.

Meantime, covering your car’s cameras with tape might put a stop to the false alarms, but it might also create new problems as the computer searches in vain for the camera’s input. And your concerns about insurance hassles are well founded, too. It’s not hard to imagine the owner of a car with disabled safety features being refused cover in the event of a crash.

My experiences with the very latest turbo-diesel engines available suggests that DPF burn offs are being programmed to happen much more often. It’s likely to be a manufacturer response to the problems associated with DPFs that become clogged and then require manual cleaning or even costly replacement. By programming the DPF to burn off more often, the theory is that this will lead to fewer DPF blockages and other problems, making life easier for the car’s owner and reducing customer complaints.

Perhaps another aspect of this is that the DPF burn usually takes several minutes and kilometres of driving to complete. If the vehicle is stopped before the burn is complete, it may try again for a complete regeneration (burn) as soon as possible, which could be why you’re seeing these frequent notifications on the dashboard.