I have recently bought a Ford Mondeo Automatic 163 bhp diesel Titanium X 90000 miles and full Ford service history - I would like some suggestion regarding this fault:

The car was sold to me by my best friend and he would not have sold me a car that he knew was faulty. As soon as I drove the car, I thought the gearbox was very noisy - I appreciate it’s very difficult to diagnose a noise without hearing it. As you accelerate there is a noise which appears to be coming from the centre of the dash and sounds like a turbine pump/ electric motor – the higher the revs the higher pitched and louder the noise. As soon as the throttle is lifted the noise disappears and it is possible to accelerate carefully and as the speed of the car increases and the gear has changed the noise disappears until the throttle is applied again.

As this is the first modern automatic that I have owned I assumed there was a problem with the powershift gearbox so I asked my trusted local garage to check the gearbox out when they changed the cam belt. They said they thought it was the gearbox and it sounded like a differential bearing and advised me to take the car to a well-known automatic gearbox specialist.

The specialist did a test drive and said there was nothing wrong with the gearbox (I have just changed the oil and filter with genuine Ford products) so they put the car on a ramp and drove the car with one of their engineers under the car – he said he could not hear any problems. They then lowered the car so the engineer could listed to the engine bay while the wheels were still driving and he said the problem was either the inlet manifold but probably the turbocharger as he could hear the turbo spooling. Obviously during this test there was no load on the transmission.

I have just spoken to the garage again that changed the cam belt and they say in their opinion has not changed and it is still the differential despite what the automatic gearbox specialist said.

 

Any suggestions would be most helpful.

Hi,

Have the same gearbox and engine but in a focus and noticed a high pitch whine initially that appeared to come from center dash area when using throttle that stopped when off throttle -worse when heavy accelerating-tracked it down to a tiny split in the upper turbo hose from intercooler to inlet manifold-replaced and noise gone-then 2 months later noise back-lower hose tiny split this time!!   just a thought for you to check hoses as it can be deceiving were the noise appears to be coming from.

Hi fugleman, many thanks for your reply and I will be checking this over the weekend. Thanks once again.