Grand Voyager Death Trap

After five burst tyres apparently caused by the weight of the vehicle
I've had a succession of power failures on my 18 month old 2.8 diesel
Chrysler. It's broken down perhaps ten times in two months. Worst of
all today, the power died on me when I was driving at 70mph with a car
full of kids, resulting in everybody getting thrown forward, car
skidding as speed dropped suddenly to 30mph, and car behind swerving
sharply to avoid hitting us.

The dealer who sold us the car has been bullshitting us for months
saying they could find nothing wrong. We had the car looked at by an
independent specialist and he found that the car was leaking power
overnight and that internal electrics had been wrongly wired.

When I discussed this with the Chrysler dealership one of their
tecnicians admitted off the record that all Voyagers were prone to
electrical problems because of the drain on the battery. They have too
much it for the battery to cope with. This was supported by a Chrysler
call out expert who attends vehicle breakdowns. He said they were
forever attending call outs.

My advice would be NEVER buy a Voyager or Grand Voyager, they are
potential death-traps.

 

Any chance of invoking the lemon law? Visits to the dealer and the
problems have been documented in writing by work orders, etc.?

 

Thanks for the advice, but I'm in the UK so lemon law doesn't apply.
I've already sent the car back to the dealer via a tow truck did it
within a couple of hours of getting home. No way will I ever risk
driving that car again.

I'll be placing an order for a Ford SMAX on Monday - hopefully that'll
be more reliable and less lemony!

CB

 

Just curious: why not a Ford Galaxy?

DAS

To send an e-mail directly replace "spam" with "schmetterling"
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I'll be placing an order for a Ford SMAX on Monday - hopefully that'll
be more reliable and less lemony!

CB

 

I like the seating and design of the S Max. Also some of the larger
MPVs drive like minibuses whereas the S Max feels like a car. You also
get three very decent middle seats with a decet amount of leg room.

I've just learned that the problem I've been experiencing with a
Voyager was something called 'limp mode'. The engine manageent system
suddenly decides that there's a problem and over-rides everything by
putting the engine into first gear with a top speed of circa 30mph.
That might be OK if you've just started the car from scratch and are
accelerating away, but when it happens when you're zooming along at
70mph, it's both dangerous and terrifying. Apparently it's quite
common in certain Vauxhalls.

 

Actually it's 2nd gear, but yeah.

 

I guess the ultimate, the Renault Espace, also feels like a bus...

DAS

To send an e-mail directly replace "spam" with "schmetterling"

 

Sounds like the car's transmission downshifted into "limp" mode,
this is often caused by a faulty speed sensor in the transmission.

They are bullshitting you. The battery doesen't supply power to the
electrical system, the alternator (generator) does. The battery is only
used for starting. And starting a vehicle doesen't take a huge amount
of power unless it's below freezing, or there's a problem with the
engine and you crank and crank and crank on it.

Since his job is attending callouts, why wouldn't he be forever attending
call outs?

Why would people with a Voyager that's working perfectly well be
bothering the dealership all of the time? They aren't. The dealership
only sees a small fraction of the vehicles sold by the manufacturer. Thus
they have a distorted view of the vehicles.

From the sounds of it, I would guess your vehicle has a grounding problem,
they probably didn't tighten the ground connections properly on the
assembly line. That will affect many electrical systems in a vehicle and
cause problems similar to what you described (and worse)

It's too bad, though, since it's such a small mistake that has such a large
effect.

Ted

 

Actually vehicles today do have a normal measurable constant drain on
the battery when the vehicle is turned off - due to things like "keep
alive" voltages for certain circuits like clocks or volatile memory -
they even have an acronym for it - IOD (Ignition Off Drain).

The manufacturer even has a spec. for the max. drain on a vehicle that's
supposed to guarantee a couple of weeks of usable charge if the vehicle
were to sit for that long unused with a good battery. For example, the
'02 LH vehicle FSM says that (after the various modules time out and go
into their sleep mode) IOD should not exceed 35 mA, and the battery
should be able to hold adequate charge for at least 21 days at that
rate. Each vehicle even has a fuse designated as the "IOD Fuse" that is
left out at the factory so that the battery does not get drained if it
sits for a long time, and it is installed upon delivery at the dealer.

So what the specialist was telling him is that apparently the OP's
Voyager exceeds the max. IOD spec. - something the dealer should have
been able to determine (by a simple multimeter measurement detailed in
Chrysler's troubleshooting charts).

They may be BS'ing him about that being a common problem on the Voyager
- I'm not addressing that. I'm just correcting you in that the
batteries *do* have a constant drain on them when the vehicle is off
contrary to your statement "The battery doesen't supply power to the
electrical system, the alternator (generator) does". That statement is
correct when the engine is running, but the context of the problem is
with the vehicle off.

 

Ted - upon re-reading the entire original post, I see that the context
was in fact with the vehicle cutting off while running. The dealer was
saying that the Voyagers have a problem with excessive IOD. If he was
simply stating that because the OP had brought that subject up, not
relating it to the OP's problem of the vehicle cutting off, that is one
thing. But the OP did *NOT* say that the dealer was saying that that is
what was causing the vehicle to cut off while being driven down the road.

So - yes the context of the problem was the vehicle cutting off while
running. In that context your statement of "The battery doesen't supply
power to the electrical system, the alternator (generator) does" is correct.