Hired a Fiat Punto (1 year old?) whilst on holiday in Greece last week.
2 things happened which I thought strange - any ideas/comments:(1) Drove car around 15 miles on very twisty roads, lots of steep hairpin bends. Steering felt fine. Parked to have a nose round some shops and noticed the front n/s tyre was soft, but not totally flat. Came back to the car about an hour later and as the tyre was not visibly any flatter I tried driving the car round the corner to the office of the hire company to see if they would sort it out. The steering felt very heavy, in both directions - then I noticed a red steering wheel icon shining from the dashboard. A quick ferret in the handbook confirmed that this was the electrical powering steering failure warning light. The hire company were totally useless for reasons I won't go into, so I changed the wheel (for a spacesaver - yuch!) and when I started off again, the red steering wheel icon had gone out, and the car steered normally (aside from being a bit light on one lock due to the spacesaver). Question is - can anyone explain why the power steering stopped working and then righted itself? Is it a Fiat safety feature to disable the power steering if the tyre is a bit flat, perhaps only when you stop the car for safety reasons?
(2) Same car, Punto 1.4, puncture repaired. We went "cross country" - well, up some pretty hairy rough & loose tracks, which wound steeply uphill for miles. The car handled them not too badly, but was getting a bit hot - 3/4 on the water temp guage, but well away from the red. Ambient temperature was around 33C. At times the air con was not dishing out any cool air which indicated that the engine was pretty hot, or perhaps there is a device which cuts the air con when the engine temp goes too high. Anyway, got the the end of this trail (big sigh of relief), and turned left up a fairly steep tarmac road in 1st gear. The engine just bogged down - so I dipped the clutch, gave it a few more revs and let the clutch in again - same result, it just bogged down and then stalled. I dropped back down the hill to a convenient spot and waited a couple of minutes with the engine running, figuring it would cool faster with the water pump running than without. Tried again and it seemed to pull better, but not well - I kept my foot down on the throttle then it gradually picked up and eventually returned to normal. Question is - why did this happen? Is this a safety feature to prevent engine damage, perhaps the ECU limits the power to reduce overheating - in which case I'll be avoiding Fiats completely in future because it's a bloody dangerous feature! Or perhaps the temp gauge was under-reading?
I'm beginning to wonder if manufacturers are getting just too clever (or is that not clever enough?) with ECU equipped cars, having found my Zafira got stuck in the sand two years ago because the Traction Control wouldn't allow the wheels to spin off the loose sand in order to get down to the firm stuff underneath.
Biggles