A Cautionary Tale

Hi peeps, Happy New Year.

Not been about much since they laid a few blokes off at our place and I've been run ragged (they tried to get me to attend a callout at 22:30 on the 31st, can you believe the gall of them? ).

Anyhoo, here's the beef.

I have a 55 plate Accord 2.2 i-CTDi with (currently) 90k on the clock that I bought about 18 months ago for £7k.
A few weeks ago it started to suffer from a major drop in power at high rpm and the coil light started flashing, basically it'd go into limp mode.

It'd clear no problem if switched off for 30 seconds and the issue wouldn't re-occur for a few days, but it got progressively worse and I decided to bung it into the dealers for a diagnostic.
They had trouble recreating the issue, but noted that there were some fuel pressure warnings on the log, and they cleared those.
What they also spotted was that the exhaust manifold was cracked, and when asked, they said the cost of repair would be £900.

There was a bright side though, apparently it's a known issue and Honda would repair under warranty if the car was less than 7 years old and had done less than 125k miles.
Luckily I was well under both and it was fixed for free.

A week later the power issue raised it's head again and I broke down (briefly) on the M8, but managed to nurse it back to Parks Honda in Hamilton.
...time passed while they looked at it.
Eventually the diagnosis came back that it was a faulty high pressure fuel pump and it would have to be replaced and further tests conducted.
I'm sure the lass on the phone said it was going to be £900 to fix, which came as a bit of a shock, so I told her I'd call her back once I'd made a few calls.

A 2nd hand part from a breakers was going to be around £300, depending on the age of the car it came off, so I figured that I might as well spend the extra and get the new part, so I told her to go ahead with the work.

...this was a mistake.

It turned out she'd said £1900 for replace and fit the pump, and once a new filter was added to the cost the grand total was over £2000...for a car that's probably worth about £4500.
I almost vomited.


So guess who's bought his last Honda.

I also discovered that apart from the cracked manifold issue and the fuel pump issue (there's the best part of £3k right there if out of warranty), that the pressure plate on the clutch can warp (also £900) and the chain on the oil pump is in the habit of snapping and blowing the engine up.
The cost of a new engine comes in at around £12k




Obviously I'm hoping everyone forgets about this when I come to sell the bastard though.

Your story brought back memories of a nightmare for me too with a diesel car..
About 5 years ago i decided to trade in my petrol car for a diesel to try and save a few bob on fuel costs.
So i bought a 3yr old diesel Jag, full service history,relatively low mileage... blah blah blah..
After about 8 months of trouble free motoring it broke down..no power and the coil light flashing on the dash..to cut a long painful story short, it cost me £2500 to replace the fuel pump and injectors...just over a year later ( about 2 weeks out of warranty on the previous repair)exactly the same thing happened again..yup another £2500 spunked on putting it right..after the second time, i fixed it and sold it for not much more than both repairs cost me..put me right off diesel cars so i've been running a petrol V8 Beemer since...yes its expensive on juice but in perspective i'll have owned this one for 3 years this year and it's been so much cheaper to own than the diesel car!!

I might buy myself that M3 I've been hankering for.
My brother had an E36 that I drove to Belgium for the F1 and the motorway mileage was pretty good.

Only problem is the rear wheel drive...not ideal when you're belting through the snow in the Highlands in the middle of the night.

Btw..funny you mention a Jag.
I was thinking about the 2.2 diesel XF for my next car, but after this carry on and looking into the issues with modern diesels, the idea has been kicked well into the long grass.

My wife's now on her second Jazz, and won't hear a word against Hondas. The only trouble with the first one, which she passed on to our daughter, was a rear wheel bearing - a known issue, apparently.

On the subject of diesels, be wary if you are in France and buy fuel at a hypermarket. When I was down in the south over Christmas and New Year the local press was full of stories about a lot of (possibly several hundred) folks who had breakdowns within a few Km of filling up - in fact some didn't even get as far as the pay kiosk from the pumps.

Though the cause hadn't been finally decided before I came back to the UK, it looks as though water got into the fuel at some point between the oil terminal at Port-la-Nouvelle, near Narbonne, which supplies all the supermarkets in Pyrenees-Orientales and Aude (and probably further afield) and the filling station tanks - there was very heavy rain at the end of November. This seems to have been compounded by the supermarkets bringing the tanks on-stream immediately after deliveries, without waiting for the contents to settle.

The result was failure of the high-pressure fuel pump (all the cars were fairly recent ones with common-rail systems - mostly Renaults) and an injection system full of what my dictionary translated as "iron filings". The cars all needed a complete new system at a cost of - gulp - 3-4,000€.

To me, as a former hydraulics engineer, it beggars belief that someone can design a system without an effective filter after the pump to catch the debris that it will inevitably generate as it wears, and particularly when (not if) it fails.

The local authority weights and measures people were on the case, and the owners formed a self-help group with a view to trying to get compensation, but proving fault and getting someone to take responsibility is going to be tricky and will inevitably take a very long time. Meanwhile a lot of the owners who couldn't afford the repairs are left without transport.

Time to go back to basics, methinks - stinky carbs or smoky mechanical pumps.

And, yes, I've just bought myself a diesel car - a Mitsubishi Lancer 2-litre which I'm told has VW mechanicals. Fingers and toes crossed from now on.

Yup Bob. That's what happened to my Jag. Bearings in the fuel pump Failed sending HP slivers of metal through the injectors.
Because its on the HP side you can't filter it. Very expensive repair.
Wooster, XF is a great car but I've been bitten twice by the diesel bug. Never again!

ouch ebay lol

Sorry to hear about your problems, but any vehicle running common rail diesel fuel systems will be expensive to repair no matter who makes it , that's the main reason why I run a old petrol Astra and the T Cat.

I'll give you £50 for it

For the old pump? ...done.