Greetings all,
I have a Renault Scenic 2005 1.6 16V. Automatic Petrol. Yes, I know...
Anyway after a very long trip to France we started having problems whereby the car would turn over and not start. Thinking it might be the alternator I took it into local mechanics who checked alt & battery and found no problems. On doing a diagnostic they got 'an error message about the starter motor' which they found weird considering it has started perfectly for both me and them that morning several times.
Then they couldn't start it so they plugged it in again and got 'a couple more messages about the timing belt or the cam belt' and said I would need to take it to a main dealer. Which for obvious reasons I would rather avoid doing...
So in summary the car will always start when cold. Then say half an hour later after a drop off it will start again and then it will start again a few mins later. However on about the 4th or 5th try it won't start and you have to wait for it to get 'cold' again before it will start.
Other symptoms are
-The dashboard lights are now dimming when we manually turn the lights on.
-When idling the 'range' mileage (ie what's left in the tank) display shows the mileage gradually dropping and then it will climb again once we start driving again
-The lights don't always come on by themselves any more when they always used to (in tunnels, etc)
When the starting issue happens the car turns over and sort of judders and bumps but won't start. There are no error messages on the dash, either.
So if we can rule out the battery, alternator and possibly the starter motor, we can also rule out the cam belt (I should hope) as this was only re-done less than 2 yrs (10k miles) ago.
Browsing on google I have seen some suggestions saying it might be a faulty sensor etc, and I have no idea about the timing belt? So does anyone have an inkling as to what might be the problem?
Sorry for the long post and TIA for any help!