Chasing gremlins in a car.....the stuff of legends that go on and on and on.

I have a 2012 Mondeo 2.0 diesel Peugeot 160ps with 210k miles on the clock. I have it 4 weeks, used to be a taxi.

It has that keyless start feature with the push button ignition.

One day out of the blue, a 1 second delay appeared between pushing the start button and the starter kicking in. I pushed the button and a click was heard which sounded like the motor spindle engaging with the flywheel. A second passed, the engine started as normal and off I went. This didn't happen every time I started it initially. But within a couple of days the delay was 2 seconds, then 3....until finally one morning the delay became infinite. The dash lit up as normal, the starter clicked but never spun over. The engine malfunction message came up on the dash and the engine light remained on. P269F was the only error code showing.

Called a known mechanic who diagnosed a faulty starter motor. I had my doubts but he put in a new motor and it appeared to solve the problem until today when I went to start the car and it went straight to the last stage of the previous pattern - suddenly wouldn't start at all. Engine malfunction message up with the engine light on.

Fed up with my known mechanic I've now left it in to an independent Ford specialist. At a quick look this afternoon he couldn't locate an obvious issue so he towed it to his workshop and will look at it in the morning. He did say he was going to hook it up to the computer and thought it might be a bad earth connection.

I feel a long fiasco coming! Let's see how this pans out.

Hi, strange that it was fixed with a new starter motor, as P269F isn't starter motor related. 

Didn't this used to happen with the transits? faulty starter motors that were replaced over and over but the actual problem was the DMF slowly failing and taking out each starter motor.