LDV Problems

It depends on which particular version of the G10 you have. That’s because, around this time, LDV offered three different engines in vehicles badged as G10s. There were a pair of petrol engines – one turbocharged and one without a turbo – and a turbo-diesel. Both the turbocharged petrol and the turbo-diesel used a timing chain, while the non-turbo petrol (which had a capacity of 2.4 litres) used a rubber timing belt.

As such, the two engines with timing chains should not need maintenance in this area, while the 2.4 petrol’s timing belt will need to be replaced at whatever intervals LDV specified. Workshops dealing with these cars seem to recommend a belt-change interval of five years or 100,000km, whichever comes first.

The coolant reservoir tank on your intercooler system works as an expansion tank, so it will have a high and low mark somewhere on it so you can keep the coolant at the correct level. It should be between the high and low marks when the engine is cold. Too high and coolant will be lost when the intercooler gets hot; too low and you won’t have enough coolant for the intercooler to work efficiently.

Modern engines are pretty coolant-specific these days, so you need to check your owner’s manual to see precisely what coolant is specified for the intercooler. It may be different to the one for the radiator because of the materials the intercooler is made from. That said, in the case of the LDV, I believe the correct coolant for the intercooler is the standard green type and is also used in the car’s engine cooling system.

I can understand why LDV is staying a bit quiet on this one. The fact is, you’ve modified the vehicle from standard, and LDV has absolutely no idea of the exact changes you’ve made. That makes it very difficult for LDV to comment. You’re probably going to get a more informed opinion by talking to the company that carried out the camper conversion. They may have seen this happen before and have a solution ready made.

As for the actual problem, even though you’re still within the Gross Vehicle Mass (GVM) limits, you might find that the weight of your conversion is not evenly spread across the front and rear axles. Placing heavy stuff at the rear of the van will inevitably compress the rear springs. It’s just a question of how much. Don’t forget to weigh the vehicle with all your camping and gear on board and the fuel and water tanks full, too, as this is how you’ll be travelling. Which means loaded up like that represents your real GVM.

Possible solutions include a firmer set of rear springs that will cope with the load better, or even a set of helper springs (possibly air bags) to assist the standard springs. Either way, these modifications need to be carried out by a specialist and may even need engineering approval to remain legal on the road.

There are plenty of things that can cause this, but being a petrol engine with no turbocharger, it shouldn’t be too tricky to diagnose. Any time an engine runs well when warm but struggles when cold, suspicions are drawn to the fuel/air mixture. A warm engine needs a very different mixture to a cold engine, so modern engines have sensors that monitor the engine temperature, the air/fuel ratio and how well that mixture is burning. If any of those sensors are not telling the computer everything it needs to know, poor running can be the result.

But it would also be worth looking at the air intake side of things. An air or vacuum leak into the intake manifold can also cause rough running and hard starting. The engine’s stepper motor (which controls the idle speed) could also be at fault, but could also be the victim of one of those non-working sensors.

It’s a bit hard to imagine how removing and replacing a transmission could make an engine misfire or backfire. Unless, that is, you’ve managed to bump part of the engine’s electronic controllers, wiring, sensors or even something as simple as pinched or displaced a vacuum line somewhere in the engine bay. Incorrect ignition timing can make an engine do this, but, again, that’s nothing to do with the transmission.

It could even be a complete coincidence. But did the vehicle sit for any length of time while the transmission was being fixed? You might find the battery has discharged over time. Modern, electronically-controlled engines do not like low battery voltage and can run poorly as a result.

It’s likely that there’s a fuse that will control this circuit, but there’s also a chance that the same fuse might also disable other functions on the vehicle. The problem is probably being caused by the micro-switch in the door jamb that senses when the door is open and sounds that alarm you keep randomly hearing. The attempted break-in has probably either damaged or misaligned that micro-switch, which is the root problem here.

A better approach would be to fix, replace or realign the switch or the part of the door that contacts it. That will actually fix the fault, rather than put a band-aid on it.

This is a complex issue and CarsGuide does not give legal advice on matter such as this. However, from a practical standpoint, water on the road in puddles could conceivably enter the engine and cause damage if you managed to hit just the right puddle at just the right speed and at just the right angle to force water into the engine’s air intake system.

In any case, this would likely (as you are discovering) be considered accidental damage rather than a warranty issue as the problem wasn’t caused by a fault in the car’s materials or manufacture. Which means you might be better off tackling your insurance company to see if such damage is covered by your vehicle policy. Damage to a vehicle from (flood) water is much more likely to be an insurance job, so start there.

This is a curly one isn’t it? You stand a decent chance of returning the info screen back into English, only if it’s already in English so you can drill down into the menus in the first place. You might be able to flick through the menus until you find the word 'English' (start in Settings if you can decipher even that much). Perhaps the owner’s manual gives some insight into how the language is set.

But, honestly, the quicker way is likely to be to take the vehicle to an LDV dealer and have somebody familiar with the menu system sort it out for you.

It’s tempting to think that this might happen every time you change or disconnect a battery, but who knows? Equally, it could be a glitch within the car’s body computer that controls the dashboard and many other functions in a modern car.

Conventional wisdom suggests you’ve either had a major failure of the transmission which has torn the casing open and allowed the oil out, or you’ve run over something that has punched a hole in the gearbox and produced the same results. But depending on the size of the puddle under the car, you might simply have been losing transmission fluid through a breather or missing or loose fill-plug for some time and only just now noticed it when the vehicle rolled to a stop.

The reason the car will not go into gear or produce drive is that it requires fluid (oil) to do so. If that oil escapes (hence the puddle) then those gear selection and drive functions are lost.

Don’t be tempted to top up the gearbox and try to drive home. The unit could fail on you again at any time (depending on the size of the leak) and you risk damaging further a transmission that is low on fluid. This one sounds like a warranty (transmission failure) or insurance (smashed transmission housing) claim.

On the face of it, there’s a lot wrong with the way you’re being treated here. For a start, if the car has already had the software upgrade for the accelerator calibration and it’s still playing up, I’d suggest there’s still something wrong with the throttle-by-wire system in place. So it needs to be looked at. Your car was sold new with a five-year/130,000km warranty, so this is really LDV’s problem to fix provided you’ve had the car serviced correctly and haven’t exceeded that mileage.

As such, the dealership should not be in a position to charge you an hourly rate to fix a warranty issue. As for the old 'they all do that’ nonsense, that’s an example of a dealership treating its customers like idiots. Cars do not die when you take off, regardless of how hard you accelerate, and to suggest that they do is an insult to your intelligence.

So give this dealer the flick and either try another one or – better yet – go straight to the top and contact LDV Australia’s customer service division. Australian Consumer Law is pretty unambiguous on this stuff.