Mitsubishi Problems

The Mitsubishi Pajero is one of the longest running models ever, and was first seen in 2006 in much the same form as today’s version. With that in mind, the vehicle is very much a known quantity and the trade regards the mechanical package highly.

As with any off-road oriented machine, the major thing to check is how the vehicle has been used (and abused) in the past. If it’s highly accessorised with winches, mud tyres, bash plates and lifted suspension, you can be fairly sure it’s had a tough life.

As the vehicle in question approaches 100,000km, you’ll be up for a new timing belt, as that’s the recommended change interval (some say 90,000km). While you’re in there, the advice is to change the water pump and the various tensioners and pulleys at the same time. It’s a lot easier to do it all in one hit than have to open the front of the engine a second time.

On the recall front, the big one to watch is the Takata air-bag fiasco which did affect this model.

You have a very common-sense approach to this Neil, and I agree with your theory 100 per cent. Towing a heavy load in an overdriven gear – whether it’s a manual or automatic gearbox – is not a great idea. Some gearboxes are obviously stronger than others, but even so, I reckon it’s just a good policy based on the principles of mechanical sympathy.

Towing in overdrive places huge stresses on the mechanical components of a gearbox – a piece of equipment that already has its back to the wall with 2.3 tonnes of caravan trying to drag it to a stop – and limiting the load and stresses by sticking with a ratio no higher than direct-drive (1:1) just makes sense. Think of it like your legs when riding a push-bike: Using a higher gear is fine until the driveline starts to load up, such as when climbing a hill (or towing a caravan in your car) at which point you need to shift to a lower gear to avoid your leg muscles exploding.

You’re right in suggesting that your car heads for the higher gears in a hurry to reduce fuel consumption, and this is one of those times when the manufacturer has placed the official fuel-consumption number on the windscreen sticker over common-sense. Not that Mitsubishi is the only offender (far from it) but it remains that the engine and gearbox have been calibrated for maximum fuel economy rather than maximum mechanical sympathy.

Ands let’s be honest, with a big caravan hitched up behind, no vehicle is going to record brilliant fuel consumption figures, is it?

A lot of cars don’t like having a battery that is low on charge or being jump-started. Either of these things can cause the body computer or even the main ECU to start playing up. My guess in this case would be the body-computer which controls the dashboard functions and things like the central locking system.

Before you rush out and pay a mechanic to look at the vehicle, there are a couple of things to try. The first is to take the remote-control for the central locking and hold the button down for at least 30 seconds. Sometimes this is enough to reset the computer and return the vehicle to normal.

If that doesn’t work, get the engine up to temperature, shut it down and carefully disconnect the battery. Leave it that way for at least 30 minutes, reconnect the battery and see if that has produced a reset. You might find the car will run a bit roughly (mainly at idle) at first until the reset computer relearns a few parameters, so be careful on the first drive after trying any of this.

A 2002 Magna in decent condition is around the $2000 to $3000 mark, Karen. So depending on what’s wrong with your car, the value in 'poor condition' could be as little as a few hundred dollars. If we’re talking major panel damage, flaking paint, rust and a car that needs new brakes or suspension, you could be looking at the vehicle’s scrap value which would be between $150 and $250 at current rates.

The book price for such a vehicle is really anywhere from $2000 to $4000. Exceptionally well-kept, low-kilometre examples will bring more, tatty ex-work trucks might even be worth less than the lower of those numbers. A quarter of a million kilometres is not ‘just around the block’ either, so you really need to take each example on its individual merits when shopping for something as old as this.

The engines, both the diesel and petrol V6, in this model Triton are both capable of long lives provided they’ve been serviced properly, but there’s the next catch. As cars and utes become less and less valuable, they tend to get serviced more and more infrequently.

Problems you could encounter will run from everything from worn out suspension to rusty bodies, smoky engines, tired gearboxes, shredded interiors and everything else. In fact, if it can go wrong on a vehicle, then it’ll probably go wrong on an old, very second-hand work ute. You might also find that getting it up to a roadworthy condition will cost more than the vehicle itself is worth. At which point, something newer and slightly more expensive might start to look pretty good.

There are three (generally speaking) things that can be causing this problem, Mark. You could have a problem with the clutch, the gear selectors or something internal in the gearbox itself. A worn or collapsed bearing or mangled gear cluster could cause this, but I’d expect other symptoms like horrendous noises and the refusal to select some gears at all, not just randomly. If you’re lucky, the cause could a simple mal-adjustment of the selector mechanism.

Meanwhile, you’ve told me you don’t think there’s anything wrong with the clutch but, to be honest, I’ve seen these same symptoms before on cars with worn out clutches. Sometimes the actuating fingers of the clutch break, other times there’s just too much wear for the clutch to function properly. Sometimes it’s as simple as a leak from the clutch’s hydraulic system or a stretched clutch cable. But either way, clutch problems can certainly cause this sort of grief.

Reverse can be hard to select because the clutch is not disengaging fully, so try this experiment: Turn the engine off and try to engage reverse. If it goes in easily every time and only baulks when the engine is running, that’s a classic case of a dying clutch.

The D-Max is pretty well regarded in the trade for its ability to go the distance, but modern, common-rail diesel technology has shown that a vehicle with fewer kilometres is usually a better bet than one with more. Although they do an amazing job in terms of power, torque, towing and fuel economy, today’s turbo-diesels are pretty highly strung in some ways and really need their maintenance. And the older they get, the more attention they seem to need in terms of new injectors, filters and pumps.

A D-Max with those kilometres might be ready for a pretty big (and expensive) service, too, so make sure your first trip in it isn’t going to be to a workshop. Ultimately, price, condition and service history should steer your decision as they should in any second-hand vehicle purchase. I’d take a vehicle with 150,000km with a full service history over a 60,000km one with no service records.

Air-bags deploy according to what force the crash places on the car. There’s no hard and fast rule to this, because no two crashes are the same. So, the sensors that tell the air-bags to deploy take into account the amount of deceleration involved and compare that with a threshold reading to decide whether to deploy the bags or not.

A car travelling at very low speed that noses into a wire-rope barrier, for instance, may not decelerated sufficiently for the bags to go off. But the same car, travelling at the same low speed that is hit by a moving car coming the other way, is much more likely to deploy its air-bags.

And just because the side air-bags have deployed in a crash, doesn’t necessarily mean the front air-bags will also be deployed. Sometimes the front bags will go off in sympathy with the side air-bags, but if there was not sufficient forward deceleration, the front ones should remain intact.

However, the tule of thumb is this: In Australia, air-bags are designed to deploy at speeds above about 25km/h and, in the case of front air-bags, in any impact within roughly 30 degrees of the car’s direction of travel at the time.