watchdog on diesels and clocking tonight

[scooters]

In common with most of you, my very presence on this site would normally exclude me from the cretinous hordes who have no undestanding of the words CAVEAT EMPTOR - the fact one drives old chod is proof enough.

 

However, it seems that some of our fellow homo sapiens may actually be a homo erectus or to but it bluntly A BIT THICK.

 

First off - those dastardly car makers ESPECIALLY the Nipponic Multinat that is Nissan and not forgetting the Fascisti FIAT of Italy...DO you know...I Mean DO YOU KNOW that these swine have been selling customers diesel cars that have particulate filters that clog if you drive them round town too much and if they fail it can cost you £1000 pounds!!!!!! Good God! The bastards...and....get this....it turns out that ALL THE FUCKERS ARE AT IT!!!! Yes! That Golf diesel you bought to go to Sainsburys and back is just WAITING to clog up and it will COST YOU LOADS!

 

I was quite amazed at the ignorance and stupidity of the car buying public who have driving patterns where a modern diesel would be entirely unsuitable. I mean, if you are about to shell out £9k on an item I personally check out everything I possibly can about it first and the issues with modern particulate filters in the newer diesels is a very well known issue which any twit with google can find out in about five minutes.

 

Anyway, FIAT and NISSAN have been selling the 500 and the Note with diesel engines to unsuspecting customers and WITHIN 6 MONTHS the warining lights are coming on!!

 

What has happened? Even 10 years ago most folk when buying a car would have a pretty good idea of how to maintain the engine and would also find out how to spot an issue especially when it is ALL OVER THE FUCKING OWNERS HANDBOOK. Have we become such a passive, mush brained, lazy, disposable culture that people no longer check???

 

The other article was about a couple of dodgey geezers who were selling clocked cars. Here that odious twit and his bubble and squeak mate on the bike sold these chaps a passat with £120k on the clock and a week later bought it back off them with 43k on the clock. Now those of us who know what they are doing can usually spot a hooky milage but not always and this is a pretty sneaky and potentially very dangerous crime...what did the chaps get? 200 hours community service each. Now I know we have overcrowded jails but these guys were winding back on average half a million miles a WEEK! IMHO they should have been jailed.

 

Anyway - blood pressure has just about returned to normal and I am no longer ranting at the telly and throwing Wotsits at it but CHRIST ON A BIKE that program winds me up!

 

 

(except when they take on the banks or the DVLA!)

[Negative Creep]

I'd guess the first part is that people cannot see that the mpg figure is not the only running cost of a car. They are becoming harder and harder to work on and are filled with moron aids, thus removing people from the experience. Oh and we can thank the EU and OMG CLIMATE CHANGE WERE ALL GONNA DIE nonsense for things like dpfs

[R9UKE]

I remember seeing a post on Renault forums about someone moaning that their sub-year old Koleos dCi was flagging up a particulate warning. What was the car used for? School run. Probably never seen a dual carriageway in it's life.

 

PETROL WIN. There's a reason diesels don't appear in my sig.

[Pete-M]

S'funny. Normally Watchdog spread nasty malicious rumours about cars - the old "Mondeos pull to the left" one was legendary.

 

However, if this means that the buying public might just be frightened off the nasty carcinogenic diesel powered ones than I cannot possibly see how that could ever be anything other than a good thing.

 

Well done Watchdog.

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

I'm not sure this can be entirely blamed on the uninformed masses. There's always been masses of car owners whose mechanical knowledge ends at which key opens the doors and which lever moves the seat back. However until very recently you could buy an inappropriate vehicle and suffer no serious repercussions beyond fuel economy or NVH. Now you've got ordinary bread and butter family cars which self destruct if they're not taken for a regular joyride.

 

The internet is swimming in DPF problems for every make of car. It doesn't even matter if they're down to people only using their diesel hatchback to go to Sainsburys when the handbook says they should be doing a weekly run on the Bonneville salt flats. The DPF concept is either very under developed or it is fundamentally flawed. In either case, legislation forcing it onto ordinary passenger cars was strongman-hitting-the-test-your-strength-bell-so-hard-it-flies-off stupid.

[retrogeezer]

Yeh, this car is great for the environment when you use it around town, only problem is you have to waste precious fossil fuels for 30 minutes every month to clean it out.

[Volksy]

 

IT'S A POTENTIAL DEATHTRAP!!

[ashmicro]

Anyone remember the "WatchDUG" skit, where somone dressed up as Lynn Faulds-Wood was complaining about the AK47? "There's a nasty 7.62mm hole in the end where little fingers could easily become trapped"

[Father Ted]

Anyone remember the "WatchDUG" skit, where somone dressed up as Lynn Faulds-Wood was complaining about the AK47? "There's a nasty 7.62mm hole in the end where little fingers could easily become trapped"

Was that not Lynn Folds-Over on the Mary Whitehouse Experience?

 

My own thoughts on the DPF have been well published both here and on VxON. The Vauxhall dealer sisnt mention anything about it when we bought the car, and despite doing a motorway run every week up to the lakes the thing still clogged. The car had 6 gears and if you were doing 70 in 6th the revs were below 2000RPM, so not enough for a re-gen.

The final straw with the car came when it went into limp home mode (demanding a dealer clean up) in the middle lane of the M6 towing a ton and a half of caravan - no more than 1500 RPM / 40MPH was a bit brown trousers.

[andrew e]

Hmmm this does concern me as my new bus is a CDTI 150, and at back-to-the-future speed (88MPH) it is just breaking the 2000 revs mark being an automatique... What was your outcome Ted?

[Luxobarges_Are_Us]

The car had 6 gears and if you were doing 70 in 6th the revs were below 2000RPM, so not enough for a re-gen.

 

WTF! Presumably, then, even with a 5-speed gearbox, driving at 90kph in order to try and achieve the manufacturer's own open road fuel consumption figures (isn't a high MPG the entire raison d'etre of those mingebag diesels anyway?) would result in failure irrespective of the actual amount of motorway driving that you do.

[Rocket88]

In the Channel Islands, dealers are refusing to sell stuff with DPFs, due to local driving conditions, they never get hot enough to re-generate. This only happened after a legion of unhappy buyers had problems...........you would have thought at least ONE manufacturer would have twigged this before they sanctioned them for sale over here............

[scaryoldcortina]

DPFs are a wierd idea anyway - the whole point of them is to collect the particulate soot which diesels produce. This is a problem in built up areas like cities, it is a local air quality thing not an OMG global warming one... but of course everything is "enviromental", it's the new buzz word. It's like when people misunderstand the purpose of a hybrid car and buy a prius only to use in the countryside.

 

Also, collecting all the soot in a box and then setting fire to it later is a rubbish idea. God only knows what DPF equipped cars will be like when they get a little older and start to burn some oil! The new 2012 MoT rules also cover emmision control equipment, so you won't even be able to delete the DPF.

 

 

On another watchdog related note, I did laugh at the ASA ordering shell to stop telling people they could save a litre per tank by using slightly different fuel.

[AnthonyG]

What has happened? Even 10 years ago most folk when buying a car would have a pretty good idea of how to maintain the engine and would also find out how to spot an issue especially when it is ALL OVER THE FUCKING OWNERS HANDBOOK.

 

10 years ago most people were as clueless about cars as they are now, particularly engines.

 

The reason warning stickers are put all over cars etc is because the manufacturers know that less than half of the buyers read the handbooks. The makers actively encourage this process of losing knowledge/responsibility about your vehicle, by turning things that the owners once did into dealer only operations - such as Renault and changing headlights.

 

I don't see why you get so upset about this TBH, maybe you shouldn't watch crap TV

[jonny69]

I didn't know anything about DPF problems until I read about it on here. I didn't even know cars had them or that they were liable to clogging up!

[Luxobarges_Are_Us]

I didn't know anything about DPF problems until I read about it on here. I didn't even know cars had them or that they were liable to clogging up!

 

I am not sure I did, either, but I am not the biggest fan of diesels anyway, nor am I into new cars, so it's not an issue that was going to bother me anytime soon.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

Have we become such a passive, mush brained, lazy, disposable culture that people no longer check???

 

 

 

Yes.

 

 

That makes us - who run perfectly okay cars for the square root of fuck all - the clever ones. I'm being serious!

 

I'm off out to regerenetate the reusable i-Pod OMG nicotine particulate collector DPF in the Insignum RIGHT NOW.

[dollywobbler]

To be honest, I'm not going to claim to be clever. Even when buying shite, often emotion has much more of a say in a potential purchase than cold hard facts! Hence why I ended up with a Range Rover with a 'dreadful' engine in it. Or perhaps I'm clever for ignoring the hype and having a perfect working vehicle that cost me much less than one with an OMG IZ BEST INJUN EVA Tdi.

 

It's the farmers around these parts who might struggle. Still not unusual to see them pottering about in old Land Rovers at 30mph maximum. When the old Land Rovers have all rotted away, I wonder what they'll do. There's no dual carrigeway for miles around here, though perhaps ragging something up a hill would suffice? Presume our minibuses have this sort of gubbins on them so we'll see how they do...

[Father Ted]

Hmmm this does concern me as my new bus is a CDTI 150, and at back-to-the-future speed (88MPH) it is just breaking the 2000 revs mark being an automatique... What was your outcome Ted?

Part chopped it on a Non FAP Citroen C8 HDi after its umpteenth breakdown in 2 years. Seriously, in my ownership it had 2 complete exhaust systems and a new ECU as well as 4 or 5 EGR valves (though they probably just cleaned them and told me they were new) and god knows how many dealer Comms2000 regeneration cycles and my motoring wasnt just school runs a weekly jaunt up the M6 to the Lakes wasnt enough it seems to keep it clean.

[Luxobarges_Are_Us]

I am seriously puzzled as to why the UK and EU ecofascists favour this kind of nasty shit over clean-burning LPG and CNG. It really makes no sense to me, considering that even the oil companies won't really lose much from such a shift, as they are into gaseous fuels too.

[Justin Case]

To be fair to dealers, some of them are aware of the problem, and it was partly on their warnings that I bought petrol last year. Subaru, Honda, and Alfa Romeo all warned me off diesels with DPFs, as did the local VW emporium and they only had diesel Passat estates in stock. In fact the only ones seemingly unaware were Renault which probably says something about their dealers

 

On a similar note is it true that running these diesels at less than 1500rpm, which seems likely given the high gearing, shakes the clutches to bits and means that you have DMF, OMG on top of all your other woes?

[RobT]

Makes me chuckle when people, particularly blokes, are willing to appear on TV and basically admit to being dunces. The Fiat 500 bloke being an example - he does local trips only so plumps for the 500 diesel. Where's the logic? Surely it's not rocket science to want a zippy little petrol car for town driving instead?

[scaryoldcortina]

 

It's the farmers around these parts who might struggle. Still not unusual to see them pottering about in old Land Rovers at 30mph maximum. When the old Land Rovers have all rotted away, I wonder what they'll do. There's no dual carrigeway for miles around here, though perhaps ragging something up a hill would suffice? Presume our minibuses have this sort of gubbins on them so we'll see how they do...

 

See, there is the problem - a hill farmer has no need of the DPF, he's not in an urban enviroment and the soot in his exhaust will dissapate harmlessly on its own with no help from technology. Did you know in australia you can't buy a new car without airbags? Not even if you live on a sheep station 1000 miles away from traffic....

[Negative Creep]

They do show some interesting things on that programme though. Last time I watched it the was the case of the engine rebuilders - who renewed the crank housing and pistons using a needle file and emery cloth

[Pete-M]

Every time I drive a modern diesel powered wotsit I always nail the bloody things in second as soon as the opportunity arises where it's reasonable to do so. Sometimes the soot that comes out of 'em is unbelievable.. Jag X-type 2.0d's are a favourite for giving a decently disgusting amount of shite out when they're opened right up for a minute or so.

[Cavcraft]

You need to see the pick-ups where I work, Pete. They drive round at 20mph all day and when you rev the bollocks off them for a minute or so it's like a huge black cloud has descended on the place!

[Guest Len H]

pre-2000 diesels are great, you can run them on just about anything and they belch soot. Post-2000 diesels need to be scrapped really.

[warren t claim]

I'd guess the first part is that people cannot see that the mpg figure is not the only running cost of a car.

 

That's bollocks! They also see the £15 a year road tax as well!

[scaryoldcortina]

I'd guess the first part is that people cannot see that the mpg figure is not the only running cost of a car.

 

That's bollocks! They also see the £15 a year road tax as well!

 

wow, 15 quid? You will pay more than that in VAT first time it all goes wrong outside of warranty!

 

Actually, that prompts a question...

 

the Fiat 500 twin-air is "the lowest CO₂ emission petrol car in the world" and as such is in the "A" band for road tax. Less than 100 g/km is equivalent to 79mpg. Why are all the road tests reporting that it does 40 to the gallon?

[Negative Creep]

I'd guess the first part is that people cannot see that the mpg figure is not the only running cost of a car.

 

That's bollocks! They also see the £15 a year road tax as well!

 

 

Good point - at least until the government realise theyre missing out on too much money and alter the tax bands