My MY11 SD4 auto has just been diagnosed with a cracked turbo, but as I've only found one post about this, which was from 2009 before this engine was available, I thought I'd ask if anyone had any other experience.

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I picked up my second FL2 at the end of April, MY11 SD4 auto with 38,000 miles, replacing my MY08 Td4 manual. We have another MY11 SD4 in the family so I knew what to expect from the newer engine, so on the journey back immediately found that a hiss under load at around 2000 rpm was unusual.

There didn't seem to be any lack of power, and with all the posts here about whistling turbos on SD4s, I thought I'd monitor the mpg to see if there was an indicator of a turbo issue.

My previous used to average a consistent 31mpg over my daily 15-mile round-trip commute and occasional long motorway trips, so I was expecting better with the new one, as our other SD4 gets around 33mpg on the carputer.

First weekend I put 400 motorway miles on it, and got about 34mpg, but since I've been back doing short commute trips it went down to 26mpg, something definitely wrong.

BMW(!) dealer that I bought it from gave 3 months AA warranty, so I rang them on Friday. It was a bit complicated as the AA warranty is administered by a different company, they use another company as a booking agent, and of course there's then the garage itself, but amazingly it was booked in for the Monday following the weekend (this week) with a local independent garage.

Garage confirmed the issue and have attributed it to a cracked turbo. They now have to get it out to be able to photograph it for the warranty company. As of Tuesday evening, they said that they managed to strip back to it and get it disconnected, but couldn't get it out, so were now going to remove the exhaust manifold too. It's not a Land Rover dealer or specialist, but the chap seems to know his Land Rovers, so I feel happy enough.

I know that turbos can be damaged by people driving hard and then stopping with everything red hot, but I wondered with all the other negative posts about the turbo fitted to the SD4 engine variant, whether this was a problem anyone else had experienced. Am I just going to swap one faulty turbo for another?

I'll see if I can get the photos from the garage once they have them.

A technical point which might provoke somebody else to comment,
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The SD4 turbo is physically larger that TD4 and has water cooling to the centre bearing.
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Could it be an airlock fault?
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For turbo repairs we have a factory locally called Midland turbo who are official repairers for. Garret etc. They give superb service and I can reccomend them.
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We have recently travelled Derby to Basingstoke with our TD4 auto at 39.5 mpg, our only technical mod being an EGR blank.
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Kind regards from Fred
. 2010GS Auto ex Celeb, Santorini Black, 2011 facelift , spoiler, spats, mudflaps, LED footwell lamps, Witter detach,
Other cars:-
1958 & 1959 Austin J40 Pedal Cars under restoration (I make many J40 parts)
If you have an Austin J40 or Pathfinder Pedal Car looking for a new home pls PM me.
2009 Meriva

chrisminett wrote:

I know that turbos can be damaged by people driving hard and then stopping with everything red hot, but I wondered with all the other negative posts about the turbo fitted to the SD4 engine variant, whether this was a problem anyone else had experienced. Am I just going to swap one faulty turbo for another?

pab wrote:

The only relatively common turbo-related issue on the FL2, as far as I'm aware, is splits in the turbo's pipework, but I would hope the dealer would have spotted anything like that straight away.

The old RRS was based on the Discovery, and for the Discovery too accessing the turbo (and various other engine parts) is a body off job! Discovery is a body-on-chassis arcitecture, of course, so body off isn't quite what it would be on a Freelander, but it's still a major job.

If the turbo removal is being done by an indipendant non LR trained mechanic it will not be a major job to undo and remove the turbo, the mechanic will use his common sense and work out how to remove the turbo. My guess is that he will undo the right side engine mounts and tweak the engine forwards to give him more room at the turbo bolts.
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If it's a LR mechanic working to official Topix procedures then it will be a mega major job costing tens of hours labour.
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I looked at Topix to change an engine, topix is written by a non hands on engineer chained to his office desk.
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From memory the difficult bit on the Freelie turbo is undoing the ally heat shield - a fiddly job with small screws.
The water pipes are fiddly too.
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Kind regards from Fred.
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fredastaire wrote:

If it's a LR mechanic working to official Topix procedures then it will be a mega major job costing tens of hours labour.

Finally got it out on Friday, so have sent the necessary pics and info to the warranty company, now I just need to wait for their response.

The mechanic said that it wasn't so much a crack, but a split between two parts of the casing that was allowing exhaust gases to escape. I really want to see those pics!

Success! (of sorts)

The warranty company have approved the claim, up to a limit of £1000. That leaves me with almost £500 to pay! This is where I get confused. I was already quoted £250 for the labour of removal and refitting. The full price also includes an oil and filter change, but even if you double that labour charge, that would still leave a parts cost of around £1000. Oh, and they said that the price for a new turbo was far higher, so this is for an exchange unit.

I haven't been able to find anything in the forums about the Garratt part number for the SD4 turbo, so haven't been able to search for any prices, but I really didn't think that a turbo would cost that much. I think I'll check with fredastaire's recommended turbo repair company to see if they can offer advice. I don't like the idea of handing over the money without verifying what I'm paying for first!

Am I wrong? Was I way out of touch expecting the price to be lower?

Hi, Ive checked out the Midland Turbo website, they on line only list the 2006-2010 158 up engine. I suggest you ring them for info on your turbo as it's bigger and has a water cooled centre bearing.
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Do bear in mind that the Freelander engine is a Peugeot Citroen base engine but built by Ford so they may already have an exchange Turbo in stock for a comparable Peugeot.
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The Lower cost option would be for them to rebuild your turbo which should cost dramatically less as they will only repair the faulty mechanical parts. Your turbo has an electronics control module which should be fine.
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Midland Turbo give a guarantee.
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Do please keep us up to date with progress.
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Kind regards from Fred.
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Well, it seems that I was a bit trapped.

I spoke to a chap at Midland Turbo, who searched for what he believed was the correct turbo (would need me to provide the exact numbers from the current one to 100% confirm) for a very reasonable price of £375+VAT on an exchange basis. That's more the price I was expecting, and as you pointed out, this is a company that is a distributor for the OE manufacturers, so there's no cheap knock-offs there!

When I spoke to the servicing company, it turns out that although the garage is independent, they are a franchise for the warranty work, and so the parts are provided through the servicing company, and their price for an exchange turbo is about £850+VAT. They have their set parts providers, so there's no opportunity to use another supplier, no matter how reputable. The only alternative is to let them put the car back together, give it to me, and I get the work done elsewhere.

For this reason, my best solution was to pay the c.£450 excess. It may be an inflated price, but in the end it's a smaller cost to me than getting the work done independently.

The garage have now told me that the 'new' turbo is fitted and everything is up and running, but they aren't able to program the car to instruct it about a new turbo, and so are waiting on a software update for their diagnostic software. If that doesn't work, they are going to have to get someone else (Land Rover?!) to do it.

So, so close now. Can't believe it's been two weeks now since I handed over the keys, hopefully it won't be much longer.

Still need to try to get a copy of those photos! I'm intrigued as to what the original damage was, and whether the previous owner(s) have been driving the past 38k miles with an under-performing engine.

Whilst I am glad that you are almost back up and running, I think that this thread highlights clearly that so-called "aftermarket" Warranty's are really not worth jack. If I were you, I would be looking to the BMW Dealer who sold you the car in the first place to make some sort of contribution pro-rata towards the excess that you have had to pay out to begin with. Loading the price of the replacement parts by the amount that they seemingly have is nothing short of scandalous, and all this says to me is never buy a used Land Rover from anywhere other than a Land Rover Dealer. It all seems like one big fiddle if you ask me. Foraging near Gaydon....
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MY13 HSE Lux SD4, Baltic Blue - current, 30,000> miles without fault
MY12 HSE 2.2 SD4, Sumatra Black - gone after 10 months/43,000 fault-free miles

+1 for the above, you may pay a bit more from the dealer, but with LR Warranty your covered.

I'm mobile again!

Picked up the car last night, after they insisted on a test drive first. It's now got the SD4 turbo whistle that seems to have so many threads on here. Power delivery does seem improved, so can only now hope that the next tank or so show an improvement on the MPG.

Interestingly, they said the turbo was a Mitsubishi part, not Garrett. Perhaps it's only the Garratt on the TD4, and this water-cooled one is a Mitsubishi, I've no idea. The garage had to get a third party in to reprogram the car for the replacement turbo, and they said he was as surprised as all of you in this thread, a mechanical failure on these units is unheard of.

The way the technician described it to me - there was no obvious fault, but there was a lot of exhaust soot build-up around one side of the joint between the two halves of the unit, hence the diagnosis of a pressure leak. I've asked them for copies of the photos that they took, as I'd like to show the (BMW) dealer why their £1000 AA warranty is not enough cover on a prestige brand.

On a side note, the garage that did the work didn't seem too happy about having parts dictated to them by the service company, but I guess that's the terms of the franchise if you want to take that sort of work on at all.

Thanks to everyone that offered their advice. Unfortunately although the turbo was replace, I'm still getting appalling performance; however my warranty co has now booked in with LR, so hopefully it'll all be sorted in the end.

The pictured of the removed SD4 turbo are now in my gallery.

https://www.freel2.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=1845