Gone beyond

My Land Rover specialist has had just about enough of the new models. They’re so complex to fix, he’s struggling to make money on the troubleshooting. This explained why he charged me £5500 to stop a Range Rover TDV8 going into ‘limp-home’ mode – that bill was for two turbos and two EGRS. However, the problem isn’t so much the big stuff as things like the warning lights.

Now my specialist is a former auto engineer, as opposed to a mechanic. But he’s got a terrific mechanic as well, so together they’ve got brains and common sense. They’d taken on an Evoque from a used car outfit that had its auto transmission failure warning light illuminated; the car drove fine otherwise.

Before the Evoque was booked in, they’d spent around five hours reading up on the possible causes for the fault code logged by the ECU. The specialist has the Land Rover diagnostic kit – SDD, I think it’s called – that costs a fortune to license.

It was eventually decided the Evoque needed a new transmission control module, so one was ordered. It made no difference. After more hours poring over the diagnostics kit, it was decided it also needed a position sensor for the shift mechanism in the cabin, so one was bought, fitted and coded-in. Once correctly calibrated, the fix worked for just under two miles.

Days had now been spent on this and patience was wearing thin. Defeat was admitted and it was sent to the local dealer.

The local dealer also had a game with it. He decided it also needed a new electronic handbrake ECU, which was supplied and coded. This fix lasted just a few miles.

The dealer went to Land Rover Technical for help. Together they realised that a small auxiliary battery buried deep within the dashboard must have failed. Nobody knew about this battery and it couldn’t be tested. A new one was ordered and fitted, which finally fixed the problem.

In an effort to save some money, my specialist then asked if the old parts could be refitted to the car. After another two hours, they realised that they couldn’t refit and recode them – the failed battery had spiked them. All in, and if you ignore the time my specialist had spent on diagnostics and the like, the total bill was more than £2800 on parts and LR dealer labour.

For these reasons, the trade is starting to run a mile from new LRS. I’ll not even get into the new Disco 5 and its issues…

‘The Evoque fix worked for just under two miles’