Old modern dervs

[Bren]

As you may be aware I have diagnosed the turbo being at fault on our vectra.I have also discovered how reluctant the trade are to get involved with cars having issues - I enquired today with the garage I use if they replaced turbos - I was told no because of the issues they can cause.

 

Even my local vauxhall specialist will not touch the fuel system on any diesel cars - understandable when you consider a failed pump can contaminate the entire fuel system with fragments. So its not just a replacement pump you need to consider.

 

Sadly the cost of all this work often outweighs the value of the car - couple this with owners who have watched too many shows with Dominic Littlewood, who expect the moon on a stick and "know their rights" means that quite a few garages have probably had their fingers burnt and now avoid such work like the plague.

 

Tomorrow I will get an estimate for having my turbo rebuilt - I will remove and replace it myself. Obviously I will do my homework first - if I spend a couple of hundred and it still wont play ball then it's not theend of the world.

 

What does this mean for old modern derv cars? Diesel is not the miracle fuel everybody believed it was - I can see most of them being weighed in at the first major expense. I am surprised many traders still sell such cars knowing the potential for grief - many people expect an £800 diesel to perform like a £10k one and get all upset when they don't.

 

Will I have a go a fixing the vectra? Yes because I have sunk too much in - including purchase price it stands me at around £2k.

 

Would I have another diesel? Highly unlikely.

 

My two' pennorth.

[beko1987]

I feel your sentiments. If my current ignition fault is anything more than a split hose I'm going back to petrol/xud and chalking it down to experience!

 

Luckily, including purchase, but excluding fuel, tax and insurance as I'd pay that whatever I'm in for about £60 so I can live with that...

[DodgeRover]

How much is a new exchange turbo? A friend installed a big Chinese one onto his MGF for not much at all

[Bren]

I will be making a call to a place in Skelmersdale tomorrow.

[taxi paul]

After my experience with my modern captiva dpf fecking up. I know have a 17 yr old toyota petrol bus. I really can't see me ever having another one. My old kia sedona, 06 plate tourneo and even my 10 plate hyundai i800 were fine with no dpf problems , well the first two didn't have one. I think more modern cars have such complicated dPf systems to cope with the new regulations that they are a time bomb. My mate has just traded in his 3yr old vivaro due to constant dpf issues over the last six months. Fixed under warranty. But that has now run out. He has bought a brand new vivaro. We shall wait and see.

[PiperCub]

It's a crap situation alright, while it would be easy to judge garages for not taking the work (Lazy/bunch of pussies/too incompetent etc) I think you've hit the nail on the head with the 'Moon-on-a-stick' reference sadly, with so many people these days having less idea about how cars work than they do about the mating habits of a fruitfly, they don't understand the complexities of them and how shit can go very bad, very quickly. But they do know their rights!

 

Add to that the way modern DERV's especially are designed (without much of a mind to anything other than very routine maintenance), this leaves the garage who may have done a good job, to the book, no corners cut, holding the baby when it all goes wrong, not through their doing but because of the way the engines are designed & produced now.

Natch, the manufacturers don't want to know as 1) It's not in their dealer network & 2) It's an old car ie: over six years old, so you should buy a new one so it's your fault not theirs. 

 

I guess garages are getting fed up with having to shoulder the costs for what is someone else's failure and being a business, you can't blame them for that. 

 

I know of a couple of places round me that won't touch turbo changes on certain models, the worst offender being the PSA 1.6HDi I believe, due to the amount of detritus a turbo ftp spreads around the engine via the oil. 

[gordonbennet]

Diesel is fine so long as the system was designed properly in the first place, and the vehicle is sensibly serviced throughout its entire life, which often means giving the simply stupid high mileages quoted for routine oil changes a healthy ignoring, and driving with a bit of mechanical sympathy allowing the engine to warn up and cool down.

 

The chances of finding cars that have been treated like this is near enough nil.

 

DPF's are off my shopping list mind, until that is they come up with a system like euro6 lorries have (and i won't live long enough for such a car to come into my price/age range), where the dpf condition can be called up on the screen by the driver, who can also trigger a regen manually when the time is right, and not depend on the regen lottery that is the fate of owners of cars saddled with the crap.

[PiperCub]

^^ A manual DPF regen - not heard of that, sounds like a startlingly good idea & logical solution to a problem, amazed the bean-counters didn't chop it. 

[Split_Pin]

Feel your pain, at least the garage were upfront that they didn't want the work rather than agreeing to it, taking a month to finish it and doing a half assed job.

[Richard]

.

[Ghosty]

DPFs will fuck a lot over.

 

Then there's AdBlue/piss...

[gordonbennet]

^^ A manual DPF regen - not heard of that, sounds like a startlingly good idea & logical solution to a problem, amazed the bean-counters didn't chop it. 

 

Its different in lorry world, most lorries (ours are) are on 5 year lease with full repair and maintenance contract, so it's in the makers interests (cos they is paying for repairs) to make sure it can last 800,000kms with little to no down time, or there won't be any repeat fleet orders.

Cars are different, most are either company cars or on some form of PCP or leased for 3 years, after that apart from a few makes with longer warranties (most of which probably exclude the DPF) its not their problem.

 

Lorry exhausts are scandalous, the euro 5 on the MAN i currently drive is supposed to be £11000, though one owner driver on the lorry forum managed to find a new exhaust for a bargainous* £8000.

God only knows how much a euro 6 box would set you back complete with pig piss injection.

[SiC]

Manual regeneration can be done with he proper diagnostic tools.

 

I'm just about to spend £4k on a 160k example of a 2010 A4 on its original DPF and had the emissions "fix" done recently. WPCGW?

[sierraman]

I've said before but a diesels only worth as much as you can afford to lose.

[andy18s]

I've not long changed the Turbo on my Vivaro,fitted with the Renault 1.9 cdti engine

Not the easiest of jobs due to the position it's in but got there in the end

I fitted a new but mid range price turbo from Ebay which I'm more than happy with

Could have done it cheaper and just bought a "core cartridge" for 80ish

If it lasts 12months then that's plenty,it's a working van that's getting hammered by the roads out here

[SiC]

I've said before but a diesels only worth as much as you can afford to lose.

The Audi is worth £2k to cartakeback.com, so it appears £2k for me!

 

If I get 2 trouble free years out of it, I'll be happy at £1k p/a depreciation - cheap for new cars. Plus an Eastern European probably would be more than happy to take it off my hands for more if it did go pop.

[PiperCub]

Its different in lorry world, most lorries (ours are) are on 5 year lease with full repair and maintenance contract, so it's in the makers interests (cos they is paying for repairs) to make sure it can last 800,000kms with little to no down time, or there won't be any repeat fleet orders.

Cars are different, most are either company cars or on some form of PCP or leased for 3 years, after that apart from a few makes with longer warranties (most of which probably exclude the DPF) its not their problem.

 

Lorry exhausts are scandalous, the euro 5 on the MAN i currently drive is supposed to be £11000, though one owner driver on the lorry forum managed to find a new exhaust for a bargainous* £8000.

God only knows how much a euro 6 box would set you back complete with pig piss injection.

 

Ah OK, good point, didn't realise this, you'll have to forgive my out-of-dateness, I've not been behind the wheel of a proper HGV for the best part of 15 years so I'm not exactly Mr.Current-Affairs here (though I do keep my medical up to date just in case!). 

[PiperCub]

I've said before but a diesels only worth as much as you can afford to lose.

 

I've actually shamelessly stolen this quote from you before and used it on people who've asked me about buying a diesel!! Sort of sums it up in one sentence.

[gordonbennet]

Yep PiperCub, i'm afraid the days of good old 14 litre Cummins' or Cat going on for 1.5 million miles with just regular oil changes and torqueing down the injectors and gapping thetappets annually and never missing a beat are long gone.

 

One lorry i know of where my mate works has cost the makers over £65k in repairs breakdowns and replacement over 4 years, you'd have to be bloody mad to be an owner driver these days and actually buying a modern, if i was going OD i'd be beating a path to the Hino dealer for some sensible it aint broke so we didn't fix it Toyota industrial engineering.

[Cleon-Fonte]

Sadly the golden age of diesels ended about 20 years ago, whilst there are some exceptions they've generally been on a sharp downward spiral ever since.

 

Putting fuel economy aside, diesels' only real advantages were reliability, mechanical simplicity and the ability to run on any old oily shit that was to hand. Once these advantages were lost I don't really see the point of them over the equivalent petrol, the money saved on fuel can easily end up being thrown at fixing the innumerable hugely expensive repairs when one of the complex bits of bolted on tat go wrong.

[stuboy]

i did like the look of mk3 mondeo tdci's in either ST or titty x as next car then as tdci,s pumps like to fail and eat injectors for 1000 sheckles or more repairs i decided against this idea.

[PiperCub]

GB - Interesting you talk of Hino's, this evening at work, I was watching an incoming feed for some rally-raid type event in Russia/caucuses and many of the rally trucks were Hino's! Guess they build them tough at Toyota.  

[overrun]

i did like the look of mk3 mondeo tdci's in either ST or titty x as next car then as tdci,s pumps like to fail and eat injectors for 1000 sheckles or more repairs i decided against this idea.

 

They are fine IMO.ST then Ghia X, for me.

[Schaefft]

Pretty much exactly the reason why I would be very hesitant with recommending a used turbo diesel, and why I wouldn't own one. There are so many more things to consider other than fuel costs. I think many literally just buy them because they think they are "just cheap" to drive, without actually figuring out whether it makes sense to them or not, and without considering the costs of the added complexity that comes with modern diesels.

 

We will get exactly the same problem with the down-sized beyond reason turbo petrols everyone is building now, most of them won't be financially viable not too far into the future once they are older. Everyone is talking about the environment and less air pollution. The fact that the usable lifespan of a car gets significantly reduced by the technology that's now being introduced (BMW tri-turbo engines, I mean what the fuck?!), and that these scrapped cars mean there's an increased necessity to produce higher numbers of new cars (which certainly cant be good for the environment) doesn't seem to be an obvious problem to most.

[Ghosty]

If it doesn't have a Bosch pump etc...

[JayW]

Personally, I think diesel engines peaked with the XUD. Though a TUD is perfectly acceptable. Oh, and a banana obviously, but that's my limit of modernity.

 

I had a Vectra 2.2td and it sounded like an effing tractor.

[SiC]

If it doesn't have a Bosch pump etc...

And modern, then it's probably half decent!

 

In regards to fuel economy, a lot of modern diesels with all their emissions crap aren't even that good. A colleagues 2.0tdi 170bhp Leon apparently just about got 39mpg cruising at 80mph. This Audi in acquiring usually gets 44-45mpg. Both are not far off the petrol equivalents.

[Captain Furious]

A good old 2.3 Indenor diesel sierra in misery spec is what you need. Anything newer is just far too complex

 

When I was waiting for my company insignia to be ordered a few years back I had a Golf 1.2 Turbo petrol on hire for a good few months, I was initially sceptical about being given a 1.2 to do 1000’s of miles a week in thinking it'll be rubbish, but it was fuggin ace! It was quite long geared in 5th so completely unstressed at 70(ish) mph (really, you could do licence altering speeds without realising) round town it was nippy and light to drive and it never gave less than 50mpg. I missed it when the insignia arrived, the old dustbin lorry sounding CDTi was terrible to drive in comparison, at anything other than straight motorway cruising it just wasn't as tractable or smooth or compliant.

 

It was a 12 plate and that's about as early as they come so they're not gonna be shite money yet, but these little turbocharged petrol engines from Ford and VW look to be a good shout to me. Diesel's days are numbered for anything other than lorrys and canal boats.

[stuboy]

the missus 03 turdo diesel focus seems ok..but the design been about 25 years plus

[PiperCub]

Pretty much exactly the reason why I would be very hesitant with recommending a used turbo diesel, and why I wouldn't own one. There are so many more things to consider other than fuel costs. I think many literally just buy them because they think they are "just cheap" to drive, without actually figuring out whether it makes sense to them or not, and without considering the costs of the added complexity that comes with modern diesels.

 

We will get exactly the same problem with the down-sized beyond reason turbo petrols everyone is building now, most of them won't be financially viable not too far into the future once they are older. Everyone is talking about the environment and less air pollution. The fact that the usable lifespan of a car gets significantly reduced by the technology that's now being introduced (BMW tri-turbo engines, I mean what the fuck?!), and that these scrapped cars mean there's an increased necessity to produce higher numbers of new cars (which certainly cant be good for the environment) doesn't seem to be an obvious problem to most.

 

A TD to me is a couple of hundred quid hack - when it FTP's big time - goodbye, thanks, make friends with the weighbridge. 

I've stopped a good few of my folks OAP chums going the diesel route as there's always big play on how much mpg they do to the exclusion of everything else. Now fine if you do 20K+ miles a year but an OAP pottling about for less than 2K/Yr? No way, the tiny fuel cost saving will be eaten ten+ fold by clogged DPF's, injectors, etc etc. They all stuck to petrol!

 

Share you view of the new super-duper tiny pez turbos, they are great don't get me wrong, I drove a mates Fiasco with a 1.0l motor in it - amazing thing but I wouldn't want to own it when it gets anywhere near 100K (prob less) nor would I want to try and fix it. But then again, they probably aren't designed to be fixed in the first place (just 'put a new one in' or scrap and replace the car). 

 

It amuses me when makers trot out the usual corporate 'Saving the planet' bullshit when launching their fancy new kit. Kit that will have a massively shorter life than stuff even a decade ago so will be scrapped at or around the ten year mark (often less than that). They neglect to tell you how much resources the car consumes just being built and how wasteful it is to produce stuff that has a low life span and how it's a better idea to consume less, make stuff last longer (by design and use) so reducing demand/wastage.

Well, that isn't sexy, doesn't sell cars and make lots of money now does it..........