Mitsubishi Lancer Pricing and Specs

There’s nothing wrong with your car, Regina, this is just the way a car’s air-conditioning works. And yours is behaving completely normally.

Although the fan will blow air when the car’s engine is stopped, the actual air-conditioning (which is what makes the air cold) needs the engine to be running to power the AC’s pump. Without the car’s engine, the AC pump won’t work and the air coming out the vents won’t be cold. When you start the engine, the AC pump suddenly has the power it requires and the air gets cold. That’s just how it works.

It could be that the gearbox linkages are poorly adjusted, meaning that the gearbox is not fully selecting fifth gear, allowing it to jump into neutral. But it could also be that the selectors themselves are worn or that there’s internal wear inside the transmission that is allowing the gearbox to leap from fifth to neutral all on its own. Either way, it’s a problem that could lead to a range of potentially dangerous situations, so it needs further investigation.

It’s probably worth mentioning that a batch of five-speed manual Lancers made between May and June 2014 were recalled to fix a problem with the gear selectors which could see them suffer gear-selection problems with reverse and fifth gear. Your car, as a 2011 model, shouldn’t be affected by that, but it does seem a bit of a coincidence.

The first sign of a blocked drainage system in a car is usually wet carpets. This, however, is not necessarily the result of a blocked plenum drain, as there are other causes including a blocked air-conditioning drain, a poor door or window seal and even a hole in the firewall between the engine bay and the passenger compartment.

In the case of a simple hole in the firewall, the solution is usually a rubber grommet which will cost a few cents and will sort things. For other leaks, however, you need to take the time to learn where the drain tubes live and ensure that they’re clear and free of mud or dust that could be blocking them, causing them to overflow into the cabin.

The other possibility is that the leak into the car is being caused by a faulty heater core which is allowing the engine’s coolant to escape. That’s a bigger fix as it usually involves removing the dashboard to access the heater core which then needs to be replaced. But if you’re lucky and it’s a simple blocked drain pipe, the drain holes for both the plenum and the air-conditioning drain should be visible on the firewall, below the windscreen. Undoing them and clearing them would be the first step to curing the problem.