Screwed up - car stopped in a ford (as in water)

I'd like to be able to wade in with watertight advice but fear I'd just dilute the seriousness of you being beached.

some similar issues discussed here

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=220&t=1855345

including this comment:

Theres an electrical engine cut out on bmws somewhere for a crash maybe the water has messed it up?

not sure this helps.

Father in law's Golf was written off when the car park next to the Fowey river flooded - not good to find your car full of water after a nice dinner. Water was over the sills and got into the car. Insurance paid out.

I had a Xantia that I drove through flood water that was deeper than it looked, it hydraulic'd the engine. It was only worth £500 and it was my fault so I didn't even think of claiming. That was a write off.

I'd wait until tomorrow - it may dry out and start working again. It may not be an insurance job - the insurer may treat it as avoidable flood damage i.e. you had a choice to go through the ford or not. Phone the insurance company tomorrow and ask them.

If you have a trusted independent specialist I'd have it recovered to them rather than a dealer.

Good luck.

Do not try and crank the engine until the mechanic has had a look, an engine can ingest just enough water to stall it but do no damage, especially at idle, but the starter motor can put enough torque into it to do damage. Before anyone does try and start it they need to stop compression taking place by removing the spark plugs (petrol) or glow plugs (diesel). That way water will fire out of the bores or you can stick a camera down them and take a look.

Go and look where your air intake is. Some modern cars have them very low down and can suck water in from a deep puddle, let alone a ford. You may be lucky and it's electrical but if you have a low intake duct then you my be in for a big bill.

TBH it does sound more electircal than engine hydrolock. Googling shows the wading depth is 30cm/12". Also a quick search on google images seems to show the air intake is pretty high and just above the radiator. So fingers crossed.

I had a Xantia that I drove through flood water that was deeper than it looked, it hydraulic’d the engine. It was only worth £500 and it was my fault so I didn’t even think of claiming. That was a write off.

My Xantia had the control for raising the ride height using the Hydroactive suspension. I used it a couple of times when it might just have made the difference.

Maybe not what you want to hear but if you drove it through the ford, how is it an insurance job?
(edit: oops - forgot about comprehensive insurance (despite having it myself) - I guess it will depend on whether they think it was an accident or reckless)
Hopefully it's just an electrical issue but you'll have to pay for it yourself. Any competent garage should be able to assess it without it going back to a BMW dealer.

Not what you want to hear but there is a good chance they will write the car off. Not for anything that con't be easily fixed today, but because water ingress invariably leads to electrical gremlims for the rest of the car's service life, which you will insist are the result of the flooding and will (rightly) want to be sorted by your insurance. On the basis of experience they may well choose to simply write it off now and count their losses.

eesh... if water got into the air intake/filter (intake manifold) for the engine then you're gonna have a bad day.

Theres a reason landys have 'snorkle tubes' up to the roof.

Best thing to do is dry it out as best you can, it could just be wet electrics, but it's kinda imposssible to diagnose without seeing the car.

Where is the air intake for the engine in that car? if it went blow water lvel you're probably looking at a new engine.

My Xantia had the control for raising the ride height using the Hydroactive suspension

That was with it all the way up! Water came up to the windows - totally my fault, I came back from a work trip to find that the road the office car park was on was shut for resurfacing. Only way not blocked by large machinery was down a small dip which was comprehensively filled with water.

A friend wrote off her BMW after driving through a ford, turns out they have a very low air intake.

Go and look where your air intake is. Some modern cars have them very low down and can suck water in from a deep puddle, let alone a ford. You may be lucky and it’s electrical but if you have a low intake duct then you my be in for a big bill.

Not just ‘modern’ cars, although I’m not sure exactly whereabouts ‘modern’ actually starts, but twenty-one years ago all around north Wiltshire and south Gloucestershire there was a lot of flooding, and a very good friend of mine drove through some deepish water on her way to work at Dyson, in Malmesbury, and the car just stopped dead. It was a Megan. It was towed to a local garage, where there were a few other dead cars, including several Megans, all with low air intakes, and all written off due to sucking water into the engine.
Honestly, you’d think that car manufacturers would actually test cars through water of various depths, and not put an air intake where it could inhale water and drown itself!

Roll’s eyes.

Open the air filter housing and see if the filter is damp. If it's completely dry hopefully it's electrical and some WD40 will sort it.

If the engine fan was running it could have sprayed water over the engine/electric/air intake

Never had a problem like that with my old Suzuki SJ410.

Honestly, you’d think that car manufacturers would actually test cars through water of various depths, and not put an air intake where it could inhale water and drown itself!

For the next generation I'm kind of hoping those floor mounted battery trays are well sealed 💧+⚡=💷💷💷

Open the air filter housing and see if the filter is damp. If it’s completely dry hopefully it’s electrical and some WD40 will sort it.

Good shout, if your air filter is dry you may be ok.. if it's damp, you're potentialy knackerd.

Do not try and crank the engine until the mechanic has had a look

Bit late for that as he's already tried starting it (a couple of times I think).

****'ed car, sorry..

<p><span style="font-family: Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, 'Noto Sans', sans-serif, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', 'Apple Color Emoji', 'Segoe UI Emoji', 'Segoe UI Symbol', 'Noto Color Emoji'; font-size: 16px; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Bit late for that as he’s already tried starting it (a couple of times I think).<br /><br /></span></p>

<p>I had no option. To get the car in to neutral from park I had to press the start button, but engine did not even turn </p><p> </p><p>fully accept it could be screwed </p>

.

Older X1 is surprisingly competent IME and sill-depth water shouldn't pose a problem mechanically
I think that the newer X1 has a lower wading depth (250mm down from 300) and a slow speed limit too, 5mph?
Combine that with a slope in to the ford and a bow wave and you could overreach. Fingers crossed that it's purely electrical, below sill-level still water shouldn't be mechanical
Insurance-wise you'll probably need to demonstrate proper care and adherence to the handbook

As above airfilter out 1st then go from there

Petrol or diesel? Petrol you might get away with it, diesel and I’d say it’ll be goosed.

Probably not what you want to hear but I agree with most here saying it's probably goosed. It might not have gone above the sills where you could see it, but with a bow wave you can easily double or triple the height of the water around the engine bay and force water into all sorts of places it shouldn't be.

It does sound more electrical than water inside the engine because that would be pretty much instant game over but it doesn't take many wiring looms to fill with water and river sediment to completely wreck them.

If you go through insurance, the cost to them of replacing wiring looms for the engine will force them to write the car off in all likelihood.

checck your air filter, if it's not wet than you may be ok.
But the prognosis isn't great.

If the water was only sill deep it really should not have got into the air intake.  I bet it dries out fine

Yeah dry it all all out first.

Good opportunity to get yourself a “proper” SUV now 😉

My money is it will ok in the morning btw

Good opportunity to get yourself a “proper” SUV now 😉

I was expecting that one after my enthusiasm for my faux SUV in other threads 😞

Still thankfully because it is a faux SUV no water got inside the car.

Mechanic coming out this morning…

Just over the sills?

So basically it's either:

I bet it dries out fine

or

But the prognosis isn’t great.

Place your bets!
For OP's sake I'm hoping it's the former, rather than the latter but I'm invested now and interested to find out which it is.

If the air filter and air box is dry then it's not got in the engine. Far more likely that water has got in the loom at the front of the engine bay and that'll be why the car thinks the bonnet is open. Fingers crossed when it dries out it'll be back to normal.

In a neat reversal, I once wrote off a ford by driving it through a BMW 😉

I did this years ago in my Vauxhaul Corsa 1.5 TD, water lock in the engine crossing a ford in Great Langdale. Pushed it out, eventually restarted it, firing on 3 cylinders, spewing 1/4 of the diesel into the exhaust where it burnt creating a huge plume of smoke out the back. Drove to Ambleside, where a garage pronounced it 'shagged'. Recovered home and engine rebuilt with a new piston and conrod. Went on to do another 100,000 miles in it before it finally died of old age...

£900 bill IIRC, in '94 ish...

Oh dear. Fingers crossed its not as bad as it seems.

I found out my 1990 Celica had an air intake at front splitter level driving through flood water - I would have normally detoured but I was on my way to a new job and chanced it as it wasn't that deep.

I knew it was water in the engine, filter was wetter than a washing up sponge. I wasn't gunning the engine though so when recovey driver arrived and I asked him if we could first remove spark plugs, syphon out water (loads) crank it over and put plugs back it. Filter out plugs in we started it up with a bit of white smoke and I continued on to my new job.

Did another 1k miles or so before big end went I suspect water had got into oil, I might have been OK if I changed it ASAP. Now there's no chance I'd drive through more than a few cm of water too many ways to cause damage, electrical, undertray, engine, etc.

I met my neighbour during storm Frank.

The water was over the only bridge on the way to the main road. Id just been up to the mainroad and seen the traffic chaos and turned around.

I met her and said probably not worth chancing it in the BMW the waters quite deep*.....

- never saw that car again.

*it was in my cab and the cab was a clean 3ft from the ground level.

Anyway if the waters in the engine bay cab latch its probably entered the intake. likely when you enter the water and initiate bow wave - even sill deep water can come up quite high on the front end if you get the speed wrong.

To get the car in to neutral from park I had to press the start button, but engine did not even turn

it is possible that the starter motor did attempt to turn the engine over but the cylinders were so full of water that it couldnt turn at all, so sounded like nothing was happening.

I had to press the start button, but engine did not even turn

I hadn't seen that.

I would have hoped that if absolutely nothing happened then it's hopefully electrical but if the starter tried and the engine didn't turn over then that sounds particularly bad to me.

On my car (not keyless start) I just need to turn the ignition on to allow the gear lever to be moved from  N to P.

On a slightly different note, at least the OP can learn from this - my mate has a 4 or 5 year old LR Velar and driving down the motorway the other night it just died and all the warning lights came on.

Having waited 1.5hrs in the dark and rain it was recovered to the dealer who has announced that the turbo had blown dumping all sorts of crap into the oil and the engine is toast - £10k repair bill!!
69k miles, fully serviced and just out of extended warranty.  Apparently the dealership has had to replace 3 Ingenium engines so far this year!!

Mr local garage man (subcontract from AA) came out this morning, stuck a battery pack on it and said, it’s not working and needs a full garage diagnostic. He refused to accept the job for recovery so we are now waiting to see if anyone else in deepest darkest wales will accept the job, genuinely just think he wanted to get a nice call out fee, but couldn’t be arsed coming out last night or doing anything!

Every time we speak to the AA they ask if we are in danger . So far we have been saying no, but thinking of changing that as it’s a 6 mile walk to the nearest road and prob 10 to a village. Last night we had 70mph winds and it was snowing

Another post about crap breakdown service! Green Flag have a guaranteed recovery option FWIW (not that I've had to use it in the last 10 years!)

Every time we speak to the AA they ask if we are in danger

You're in Wales, nuff said... AA SWAT Team required 😁

My experience of AA is similar. They contract everything out and the contractors aren't interested in the slightest in helping you. I once followed a recovery lorry which was meant to head to ingleton from ribblehead viaduct, to get mobile signal and decide where to recover to for a German friend. They never stopped and instead drove all the way to Morecambe purely because that's where they came from!

Cancelled AA, Mrs FD realised she also had Green Flag cover, 45 mins later a very nice helpful garage lady turns up and the car is being loaded up. Turns out water had got past the air filter. And what looked like a swimming pools worth poured out of the exhaust when it was being loaded

Screwed car me thinks.

Just as an aside , animals are not allowed in recovery vehicles, we didn’t know this. So Mrs FD is now going to have to drive back in our other car to pick us up later.

Oh 🙁

Bugger.

It's surprising* how many cars have their air in takes down low in the engine bay.

*and not in a good way.

Now there’s no chance I’d drive through more than a few cm of water too many ways to cause damage, electrical, undertray, engine, etc.

*holds hand up sheepishly*

Another one guilty of hydrolocking an engine driving through water. It was in the floods a few years ago. Its easily done and doesn't take much. I did it with my Golf GTI. Water really doesn't compress. It snapped a camshaft clean in half and completely trashed the engine.

Just as an aside , animals are not allowed in recovery vehicles, we didn’t know this. So Mrs FD is now going to have to drive back in our other car to pick us up later.

You'll be in trouble when she finds out you've been calling her an animal... 🙃

Bad luck on the wannabe submarine. Painful in the extreme. 😕

Every time we speak to the AA they ask if we are in danger . So far we have been saying no, but thinking of changing that as it’s a 6 mile walk to the nearest road and prob 10 to a village. Last night we had 70mph winds and it was snowing

I may be missing something here, but 1) where were you if it's 6miles to the nearest road 2) did you spend the night in the car? 🙂

Is that damage covered by insurance?

Ouch.  sounds fubar.  My usual bad guessing 🙁

Doesn't sound good, keeping crossed fingers though; the exhaust would fill when the engine stopped

Is that damage covered by insurance?

it normally is - considered similar to crashing into something, ie crashed into water

it normally is – considered similar to crashing into something, ie crashed into water

When I did mine, I never asked, which was a bit daft.

I had a local indi garage rebuild the engine and it wasn't that expensive (compared to the cost of a new car etc).

H G Evans in Old Harlow. No idea if they still exist...

I wrote off a ford engine in a puddle, wasn't even a particularly impressive one, the ford or the puddle.

my embarrassingly old and crap peugeot has a big hole in the air intake tube (pipe?) at its lowest point where I drilled it hoping that any water that managed to get in would pour out there in the instance I did something like this. I have no proof that it has ever saved me although I have survived a few big puddles (once or twice stupidly acting like an idiot, still trying to impress my wife, acting like a teenager, full of fake bravado while secretly thinking 'oh shit oh shit' what if i have borked the engine?').

Tom as that pipe is a vacuum you'd just turn it into a straw...

And Or even worse bypass the filter

Tell me that all those morons who were deliberately driving at speed into that ford in the video on the first page of this thread.....despite abandoned cars littering the road, despite spectators obviously waiting in the expectation that they would break something.....tell me they were not claiming on their insurance afterwards?

I may be missing something here, but 1) where were you if it’s 6miles to the nearest road 2) did you spend the night in the car? 🙂

yeah, this…? Well point 2 especially. Given you have breakdown cover, even if the cars too difficult to move I’d expect you to be taken home/a place of your choosing for the night!?

Unless you were more of the, “well, seems a nice place for a walk in the morning and we’ve got some sandwiches” persuasion in which case fair enough.

.tell me they were not claiming on their insurance afterwards?

I assume they were.
Same as the person who crashes due to too much speed, overtaking in a bad place, being on a mobile phone, badly maintained car etc.

I would be interested in the number of claims turned down under the 'driver broke rule no.1'

Ha! Oh dear, that's thrown me, I've seen it described as a recommended mod on the peugeot forum

I may be missing something here, but 1) where were you if it’s 6miles to the nearest road 2) did you spend the night in the car? 🙂

Ok I have just check the distances and it was 2.5 miles from the nearest tarmac road but it feels considerably further. I had to jog back the holiday cottage that was 1.5 miles away to get satellite signal to get the cottage owner to come and drag the car out of the ford with his 4x4. The cottage owner was absolutely brilliant and then lent me his 4x4

The AA assigned the job to a local Aberystwyth company as they didn't have any AA teams 'available'. After hearing nothing at first we rang the company up. You could just tell he couldn't be bothered. He said he would come later that day. We rang him again later and a more important job had come up. Eventually the next morning he came out and stuck an external battery pack on the car and couldn't start it and said it needed full garage diagnostic except it couldnt take the vehicle as his lorry was in for an MOT.

Back to the AA and they said they would re assign the job to someone else, except they kept re assigning it to the same company who kept rejecting it.

Mrs FD then remembered she had Green Flag cover too. So she rang them. They obviously had a slightly different database. And a brilliant company call Grahams from Aberystwyth came out within 1hr and recovered Mrs FD and the vehicle back to our home address.

The car is now sat on our driver waiting recovery by our insurance company to take it to their diagnostic garage.

Interesting Notes on Vehicle Recovery

Mrs FD whilst chatting to the recovery driver gleamed the following. Each driver can only drive a max of 2.5hrs at a time. So to get from Aberystwyth to where we were, to then get the car home and back to Aberystwyth would be more than 2.5hrs. Normally if its a very long journey multiple companies may be used and swap the car over to allow drivers to get back home etc. The driver said they would have to stop for 45mins on the way back to Aber which meant that it would possibly be there only job that day.

Handy to know if you ever need recovery !

This is the valley of doom. looks very pleasant there, but its 1,500ft up, on the day it happened it was blowing 70mph winds and had been snowing over night.

Interesting Notes on Vehicle Recovery

Mrs FD whilst chatting to the recovery driver gleamed the following. Each driver can only drive a max of 2.5hrs at a time.

That must be new? I've been recovered a few times from mid-Wales back to Cambridge (motorbike and car) and they just drove it in one go (Green Flag).

Handy to know if you ever need recovery !

Had to recover my Elise from Blyton in Lincolnshire to Southampton a few years back. That was a relay of three different trucks, a 45 minute break for the first driver and a 30 min wait in a random service station car park at around midnight for the next truck.

The old AA recovery service was called AA Relay. I used it in the 90s Sheffield to Bath. Local patrol towed the car to a depot, car was loaded onto a transporter with other cars and driven south to another depot, rinse and repeat until I got home. Seemed to take forever.

About 10 years ago I was out running and spotted a fire engine on a stretch of road renowned for flooding (site of a local mill). Pootled over and saw a new Aston Martin DB9 up to its armpits in water. The owner was most unimpressed, but the fire peeps were having a chuckle. Can only imagine he was not a local because that road always flooded, and nothing was done to improve it for years, even after a developer popped a row of houses alongside it.

@tom84

Not sure it's that mad, it's unlikely to syphon water through the hole unless the main air intake is restricted. If restricted by a bow wave of water, it's likely that the bottom of the engine bay could still be above the water.

However it may allow water to drain into the air intake if you are driving slowly through particularly deep water, and once it airlocks the intake it could be syphoned into the engine.

Back in the day my dad was driving back over a partially flooded fen near Littleport , got the engine in the Cortina wet and we thus stopped.

Waited 20 minutes to dry, and off we went again.

My brothers had an old Landy and we took it for a 4x4 adventure day – it didn't have a snorkel and we waded it too deep and hydraulicked the diesel engine. We took the glow plugs out and turned it over to spit out the water and somehow managed to restart it and get it a few miles down the road from the private land it had been on before it fatally packed in (this was fortunate as the recovery company wouldn't come out to private land). We ended up swapping the dead engine out for a Rover V8 block 🤣

How is the car?

my embarrassingly old and crap peugeot has a big hole in the air intake tube (pipe?) at its lowest point where I drilled it hoping that any water that managed to get in would pour out there in the instance I did something like this

I’m so lost. Is this hole lower than the intake? Which side of the air filter is this hole?

Llechwedd Maur ! Never had any trouble in the ford with my Welsh Water Marina van.

The old AA recovery service was called AA Relay. I used it in the 90s Sheffield to Bath. Local patrol towed the car to a depot, car was loaded onto a transporter with other cars and driven south to another depot, rinse and repeat until I got home. Seemed to take forever.

I remember getting 'relayed' from London to Merseyside back when the M25 was still under construction so traffic was congested anyway but most of the trip involved being loaded off, waiting and back onto recovery trucks in different locations with some lengthy gaps in between waiting for a vehicle to become available for the next leg. Took 14 hours.

How is the car?

Probably not pining for the f(j)ords…

How is the car?

Screwed

The engineer gave me a call the other day. His recommendation is total loss or repair bill of approx £20k 🙁

Apparently water had got every where and it would require pretty much everything new ie engine, starter motor, wiring looms, exhaust system etc etc. No water in the cabin though.

If someone can salvage it and knows what they are doing they will end up with a nice car for not much money.

Apparently though it will take 3 weeks for the engineer to get a slot with the insurance company to inform them of their findings...

Apparently though it will take 3 weeks for the engineer to get a slot with the insurance company to inform them of their findings

Whaaaaa?!!

Sorry for your loss - I suspect that the killer blow was the water in the loom as my mate is having a refurb engine put into his Velar for about £6.5k.

I feel for you mate, that's terrible! If water didn't cover the sills, it must've been the bow wave?

Mrs FD whilst chatting to the recovery driver gleamed the following. Each driver can only drive a max of 2.5hrs at a time. So to get from Aberystwyth to where we were, to then get the car home and back to Aberystwyth would be more than 2.5hrs. Normally if its a very long journey multiple companies may be used and swap the car over to allow drivers to get back home etc. The driver said they would have to stop for 45mins on the way back to Aber which meant that it would possibly be there only job that day.

Sounds like a slight misunderstanding of the tachograph rules.

You can only drive for a maximum of 4.5hours without a 45min rest, and it has to be a rest, you can't do work like loading/unloading.

If you drive for 2 hours, load for an hour, then drive for another 2.5 hours, that counts as 4.5 hours. So they probably couldn't drive to a job 2.5 hours away without a 45min break (as fixing/loading the car doesn't count as driving, but isn't a break)

You can split the breaks as long as the first one is >15min and the 2nd one is >30min and within 4.5hours total driving time.

You can only drive for 9 hours a day.

You can go over the hours if you're stuck in traffic at the end of the day (i.e. if the road is closed for an accident 15 minutes from home and you're stuck there for an hour you don't have to just stop and stay the night). You just write a note on the tachograph. That wouldn't apply if you got stuck first thing in the morning and were just running an hour late all day.

There's a few other things around max hours per week, consecutive days etc.

Sorry to hear that FunkyDunc.

I can't believe an X1 only has a wading depth of 250/300mm...