Toyota People mover Range

This model Coaster bus was fitted with a 90-litre fuel tank. While that sounds like quite a bit, these vehicles are quite heavy (upwards of 2.5 tonnes) and are fitted with relatively thirsty diesel engines. As a result, you won’t be going more than about 500km between fill-ups, and that’s on the highway.

Add a trailer, roof rack or even drive into a headwind and fuel consumption can spike. But these vehicles have a great reputation for reliability and make great mobile-home conversion platforms.

A lack of drive in an automatic gearbox can be down to a number of things. Most commonly, it’s internal wear inside the transmission or torque converter that is not transferring drive from one component to the next. This can be caused by broken or loose vanes in the torque converter, a failed transmission pump, a faulty valve body, worn clutches and bands or a mechanical failure of the gearsets. And more.

Any of these things will require a transmission specialist to assess and repair, but before you do that, check the level of the fluid in the transmission. Low transmission fluid can easily cause this very problem and a top up may restore drive to the vehicle. Then, of course, your job is to find the source of the leak, because the transmission is a sealed system and should not require top-ups outside of regular servicing. But it might just get you back on the road in meantime.

These alarms work via small switches that physically detect whether the door is open or shut and also whether the door is locked or unlocked. It's a school-bus thing as that's what a lot of Coaster were used as and it's designed to alert the driver if any of his or her charges decide it'd be fun to open the rear door on the way to school.

Clearly, the door and its lock are not giving the bus the message that the door is shut and locked, so the first thing to check would be the little switches that control this message. You'll usually find them inside the door jamb where they're activated when the door is shut on them. But the rear of a vehicle is where dust tends to be drawn and settles, so the switches can sometimes fill up with dust at which point electrical contact is lost and the alarm doesn't know where it is.

You can buy a product in a spray-can called electrical contact cleaner. A quick spray of this along with cycling the switches manually a few times (with your finger or a chopstick or whatever) can sometimes restore normal operation. If not, you could be looking at a broken wire or some other kind of electrical problem in the dashboard or anywhere else along the wiring loom's path. But a quick fiddle with the relevant switch is a good first shot.