Flooded engine - how much trouble am I in?

With an excess of around £250 - £500 I bet those cheap tyres don’t seem like such a good idea anymore.

Not that it will be the tyres or drivers fault, obviously!
 
My wife spoke to the garage this morning. The battery is totally flat, so he's getting a replacement for that. He says there is definitely water in the engine, so in the meantime, he's removing the plugs, etc, so he can turn the engine over by hand and drain it, and see whether it will run. I'm going to call back about 2 to see what's going on.

My mother in law is offering us her old Yaris if we do end up chucking the car, as she's getting a new car on the 6th or something, which would keep us going in the short term and save us having to buy in a hurry if it does get written off.

Hell, part of me hopes it does get written off because I can't be arsed with getting the car properly cleaned. How lazy is that :D
 
Garage man has replaced the battery, and the electrics are all intact. However, the engine won't turn over - something is locking it. He said that from hereon it's a case of taking the block apart and suggested that I call in the insurers.

Oh dear.

I've just heard that a friend of a friend suffered a similar fate in that puddle. Ridiculous.
 
Are hybrids more likely to stop in flood water? I saw a Prius stranded in flood-water on the news and wondered why they couldn't have driven it out on electric power, then it dawned on me...
 
Vonhelmet said:
Garage man has replaced the battery, and the electrics are all intact. However, the engine won't turn over - something is locking it. He said that from hereon it's a case of taking the block apart and suggested that I call in the insurers.

Oh dear.

I've just heard that a friend of a friend suffered a similar fate in that puddle. Ridiculous.
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Gutted :(
 
Vonhelmet said:
Garage man has replaced the battery, and the electrics are all intact. However, the engine won't turn over - something is locking it.
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don't bother. all you're going to do is rack up more parts and labour charges. pay what you owe him and notify insurer.

with any luck they'll come and assess it and write it off.
 
How are you going on with this with your insurer? Is the garage you keep mentioning the authorised repairer for them?

The only reason I ask is because usually this kind of thing is generally excluded as you have not taken a duty of care with the car! (could be buried well within the policy wording!)

Water damage is usually covered if you were parked and it flooded but if you actively drove into water then some insurers can be funny about it in my experience!

Hope it's all covered or you could end up with a hefty garage bill!
 
StevieP said:
The only reason I ask is because usually this kind of thing is generally excluded as you have not taken a duty of care with the car!
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Why would that make any difference - you have not taken a duty of care if you drive into a wall at 30mph either but thats covered, as is flinging your car sideways off a roundabout into a streetlamp or reversing it into a bollard.
 
Also bores with water in there will rust. Depending on the extent I wouldn't want rust going up and down my cylinders when the attempt to start it. So if nothings bent then you have scored bores to think about

Need a DON'T WANT meme
 
I've just got off the phone to the insurer. The guy didn't bat an eyelid about it, and I have read anecdotal stories of people successfully claiming for this sort of thing from Direct Line, who we're with. They're sending someone to fetch the car tomorrow and take it to the preferred repairer. He offered the option of sending an engineer out to look at the car at our garage, but said that it can take much longer doing it that way. Enterprise are also going to sort out a hire car for me tomorrow - hopefully better than the asstastic Chevy Spark we got last time, but probably not. I need to get down to the garage and get the kids' car seats and my head unit and a few other bits and bobs.

The garage said they'll charge me £35 for their cursory look, which strikes me as very reasonable.

So, all things considered, this is going pretty smoothly.
 
sigma said:
One could say that it's plain sailing... or not :p
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Haha, thanks for that, Horatio Caine :D

Sounded like £35 flat charge. Some of you will remember when we had this same car in with them a few months back for about a week when it kept cutting out, and they ended up sending it to Camco to get the ecu reprogrammed. They charged us £150 for that, and I was fearing it would cost a fortune after all that time.
 
Vonhelmet said:
Well, like I said, it didn't pour into the car as soon as I opened the door, so it can't have been higher than the sill at the driver side. I suppose it could have been deeper at the passenger side.
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Now think about how water behaves for a second ;)
 
Not sure what you mean. Perhaps I've neglected to say that the road is pretty seriously cambered on that bend, so the passenger side would be lower than the driver side.
 
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