I am hoping that someone out there can PLEASE help me?

I bought a 2008 Mondeo Zetec 1.8 TDCi (6 speed) from a used car dealership 2 months ago. To cut a long story short, the car has been back into the garage on numerous occasions for a couple of different faults (air con not working, car wouldn't start first time when turning key) and today a mass of white smoke came out from the rear of the car whilst driving along the motorway at 60mph. When I pulled in and lifted the bonnet there was (what I can only describe as) an explosion of liquid (see attached photo) Whether this is oil, water or coolant, I don't know as I'm not mechanically minded. I was able to drive the car 2 miles to the garage as I was in the area but wouldn't have liked to have driven it further! It did seem to take ages for the engine to cool when I stopped after it happened!

My problem is, knowing how useless the garage has been to date with previous issues with this car, they will take ages to find and rectify this fault, so I am asking for any ideas as to what may have happened so I can hopefully speed up the process of getting my fixed and back in my possession (on one occasion they had the car for 10 days and had to send it out to another garage to fix because they didn't know how to fix it!)

I have attached a photo of what the engine area looked like when I dropped the car off today and would truly appreciate any help as to what this may be.

Many thanks in advance.

Les Johnson.

Hi mate,

welcome to the forum,

my inital thought was its your turbo has split but from looking at the picture you have provided and the pearls of liquid restin on the air box look to have an orange tint on them which would indicate that the liquid is coolant and you have suffered a burst hose pipe around £50 at the most mate and you will be back on the road or if it was your water pump then it would be £100.

sorry to say mate you seem to have bought a lemon but the 1.8TDCi are bullet proof once they have been reguraly serviced since new but the previous owners may not have done this, resulting in your heartship

No need to post multiple times about the same thing, you will get a better response if you keep it in one place.

Anyway, as Lenny has suggested it looks like coolant. So you probably have a burst hose, from the area the water appears to have come from I would suggest its a heater matrix hose

Many thanks for the quick response guys and sorry for the multiple posts! I'm new to this so wasn't sure how it worked. Thank again for your help though, much appreciated.