>Bill Fishel wrote:
>>C. Marin Faure wrote:
>>But the TD5 has a most
> annoying habit of jerking and hunting at slower speeds when you let off on
> the throttle. When driving the winding, hilly roads in the Dales, often
> in third gear, the engine would stumble and hunt when the throttle was
> "neutralized," in other words when you weren't making the engine work but
> you weren't decelerating either.
>I don't know that is exclusive to the TD5. My V8i Discovery does the same
thing. The jerking is annoying. I usually use a lower gear and higher
rpm's.
I've experienced mild examples of this in other vehicles, although I must
say
the 3.9 V-8 in our Range Rover has never done it, although we have an
automatic so that may mask it. But my SIII has never done this. My BMW
635 will do it very slightly every now and then, usually when it's cold.
But I don't recall ever experiencing this
with a Land Rover Tdi engine in a Discovery or Defender in
the UK. But the TD5 was quite violent at times, to the point where the
cutouts and jerking were so bad that I had to shove the thing into neutral
to let it calm down on a few occasions. Stomping on the accelerator would
stop it too, but that often wasn't an intelligent option on a curvy one lane
road with rock walls on either side. It was safer to use the brakes or let
the engine return to idle for a moment. Other than this one operating mode,
the TD5 ran smoothly and performed as advertised. It seemed noisier
than the Tdi, but that may be because of the commercial nature of our
Discovery, with no seats, carpet, etc. in the back of the vehicle. For
all I know, they may have left out some soundproofing up front, too.
The accelerator had one other annoying trait I'd forgotten until writing
this.
When accelerating from a standing stop, the acceleration was "normal" for
a diesel vehicle of this type until the rpms reached perhaps 2,500 rpm or
so.
I never really looked, but
at whatever rpm it was, the engine would suddenly surge ahead and the
acceleration rate would increase quite dramatically even though the
accelerator
pressure remained the same. I'd actually have to back off on the
accelerator to keep
the acceleration rate more or less constant. On a couple of occasions when
pulling onto a road from a full-stop junction this characteristic shot me
much farther out than I'd intended, which proved interesting on
those occasions when there were vehicles coming the other way. I suppose if
I'd driven the vehicle longer, I'd have gotten used to this, but I never
really
got the feel of it during the time we had it. Again, I never experienced
this
acceleration surge with the old Tdi, but whether this is a function of the
fly-by-wire throttle (if the TD5 has one) or is simply a characteristic of a
diesel, or at least this diesel, I don't know.
Granted, the experience with one engine does not
necessarily mean they're all like that, but with all the negative comments I
heard
about the TD5 before we got to the UK, all the negative comments
I heard after we got there, and the experience we had with the engine in our
vehicle, I would at this point be very reluctant to buy a vehicle with the
TD5,
not that you have much choice if you want a new Land Rover with a diesel
engine.
Only the (new) diesel Range Rover has escaped the TD5 as it uses (if I
recall
correctly) a six-cylinder BMW powerplant. I believe there is a diesel
Freelander
available in Europe, too, but I think it uses another powerplant,
not the TD5, although I may be wrong about that.
We will be returning in May for longer trip during which we'll be
using a vehicle from our friend again, this time
probably a D110. It will, I'm sure, have the TD5 in it, so it
will be interesting to compare our experience in that vehicle to
the one we just had. But so far, the TD5 has left me quite
unimpressed.
___________________________
C. Marin Faure
(original owner)
1973 Land Rover Series III-88
1991 Range Rover Vogue SE
Seattle
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