Renault Clio steering loss whilst driving at 40mph

Hi,

I own a 2003 Renault Clio Expression 1.2 and last week as I was driving home from work I shockingly found that I couldn't steer the car. I had just navigated a smallish bend and started to accelerate down a straight stretch of road. As I accelerated the steering wheel went totally light and remained like it - I thought I was on ice.

My car then started to veer to the right hand side, I attempted to correct this by turning the steering wheel left but this had no effect at all and the car then violently veered even harder to the right until it had spun around onto the oncoming lane, tripped over a grass verge and plunged sideways down a 4ft ditch. It then somehow managed to roll up from the 4ft ditch back onto the road. All of the left hand side of the car is totally smashed, lefthand rear window exploded, passenger sear airbag deployed. The car is now a writeoff.

I was driving about 40mph, there was NO ice on the road and there were no blow outs, outside air temp was about 5 degrees C at 5pm and there were no skid marks. I was not speeding and I did not loose grip on the corner.

I am very lucky that there wasn't any other cars around at the time, especially oncoming cars as the accident would have been much nastier. I did have to go to hospital as I suffered back pain and internal pain.

A few days after the crash I went to repair centre where the car is being held. Guess what??? The steering wheel does not control the wheels??? If the car was moving and you sat in it and turned the wheel you too would think you were on ICE.

So, does anyone know anything about this fault with CLIO ? Why would the steering fail, when I say I fail I mean the steering wheel does not move the wheels at all - not even a little bit, the steering wheel just FREE wheels and spins around.

This is a very serious fault, and could have resulted in serious injury.

Frederick.

Reply to
frederick
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Pinion sheared in the rack and pinion? You could make millions out of this, now where's that lawyer? I had a track rod strip its threads once during a tight reversing manoeuvre, but that only lost me one wheel's ability to turn.

Reply to
SteveB

Mechanical failure. I know its distressing but its one of those things. THing is, with poxy midget cars, stuff is built to keep the weight and cost down. This means stuff is weaker than it used to be.

Reply to
Conor

Sounds to me like a fully written report by an independent examiner and a telephone call to BBC's Watchdog.

Reply to
ivan

Could you suggest an examiner? Would the RAC, or AA be able to do it? How much is this likely to cost me ?

Reply to
frederick

Not being in the motor trade I'm afraid I can't help you with that one Frederick. But no doubt there are others on this newsgroup who can, as I have seen an independent engineers report suggested on a number of occasions for similar circumstances.

However if you belong to one of the motoring organisations perhaps a phone call explaining your problem may not go amiss, especially if as has already been suggested it may have been caused through the failure of piece of badly engineered kit that wasn't man enough to do the job for which it was intended.

Considering the car wasn't much more than 12 months old, personally I would be very concerned, and would want to know the exact reason why such a disastrous fault had occurred, especially if there is a potential problem with that particular model and it wasn't just a million to one off, you would also be doing other owners a favour by bringing it to light.

Reply to
ivan

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