Conventional wisdom suggests that a modern electronic fuel-injection system is smart enough not to flood an engine when starting., However, experience tells me that sometimes, you can get excess fuel into the engine if it doesn’t fire straight away. However, if you keep trying to start it, that fuel should pass through the engine, and it should eventually fire. So, I’d say your problem is something else.

A mechanic would probably start by checking things like whether the fuel pump is operating, the fuel and air filters, fuel pressure and whether the fuel injectors are pulsing when they should be. Your problem is likely to be a shortage of fuel rather than too much of it, so checking the fuel delivery pressure and rate is a critical step.

For a start, your vehicle at just over five years of age is only just out of its five-year warranty. So it would be worth contacting LDV Australia’s customer service department to see if there’s any help available for a fix, or to cover some of the costs of a fix.

Meanwhile, a lot of these plastic add-ons are attached via small plastic clips and it’s these that fail, allowing the part in question to fall off. In the old days, such a trim piece would probably have been made of metal and been secured by metal tabs or pins or even a nut and bolt. But there are some really good adhesives on the market now that would probably have the strength to effectively glue the trim piece back on. That will make getting it off again (if you ever have to) a bit messy and could damage the paint underneath, but it’s probably better than having to replace a strip of tape every few weeks.

There’s probably a very simple solution to this involving a wire that has been disconnected during the transmission replacement, and not reconnected afterwards. You might find it’s a wire to a sensor that has been bumped or disconnected, and without this, the engine doesn’t know it is below operating temperature and, therefore, doesn’t richen the air-fuel mixture to compensate.

This compensation is how modern, electronically controlled vehicles make do without an old fashioned choke lever. But if the wiring isn’t connected and the sensors all working, the car doesn’t have the information it needs to run properly under all circumstances.