Ongoing problems with Peugeot 3008 - please help!

[ritz_uk]

Hi all,

After almost a year of trying to resolve some issues with my 3008 with a 1.6l diesel (and a lot of time and money spent), I’m getting to the point where I just don’t know what to do anymore. We keep trying to get the car ready before going on a family holiday, to be told it’s fixed, and then inevitably there will be a problem. If anyone here can help, I’d be very appreciative. We’ve spent a lot of money on it and it’s always been serviced and parts replaced since new.

After replacing the clutch and flywheel at the start of 2023, we started to notice a clunk on the steering wheel when going at low speed and stopping and starting. The steering itself was absolutely fine.

This seemed to progressively get worse, but the garage said they had checked the drive shafts, motor mounts and so on. They could detect some play in the steering rack and said that replacing it would fix it.

The rack has been replaced (twice - the first replacement was faulty) but now the car pulls to the left and it feels very skittish over anything other than perfect surfaces (if I go over anything rough, the steering wheel bounces around and I have to fight it to keep it in a straight line). It also feels weirdly light and doesn’t seem to stiffen as much when the speed increases. Worst of all, the clunk remains.

I took it to have it aligned again for the fifth time under advice from the garage who did the work. I asked the new garage to take a look at the problems and test drive it. They discovered that the joint on the drive shaft has excessive play, the brakes were binding and the dual mass flywheel has started to bind too (this was replaced about 8000 miles ago). The other garage has offered to try and resolve these issues.

So, I have some questions:

1) are third party racks noticeably worse than the original parts? This one seems no where near as good as the original rack that had 100k miles of wear on it. Peugeot orignal parts are £1200 for the rack alone. I paid just over £700 for the part and fitting.

2) should the flywheel start to bind after 8000 miles?

3) any advice on how to handle this with the garage? They’ve been very nice about it, but it seems a lot like the clunking was nothing to do with the rack and now I’m quite a lot of money (and time down). The frustration of getting everyone into the car to head off on holiday after assurances it was fixed only to have the thing start to shake itself to bits is one I’m going to have to put to one side.

Thanks in advance for reading my rant and for any advice you can offer.