Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen - any chance of some help, please? I recognise the answer could be technical, 'See a psychiatrist, you're mad', or 'Get some driving lessons'.

I have a 2011 Mondeo 2.0 Sport, 26k miles. Perfect in every way, except for this one characteristic. Local garage connected a laptop and said no faults reported.

When cold, the car drives off perfectly. Once it's warmed up, trying to take off gently requires really delicate footwork. I've owned the car for 6 months and I'm pretty sure it wasn't like that at the start (but might be mistaken.) It's as if (not saying it actually is) the anti-stall is too keen to take over the throttle management. In slo-mo the sequence would be:

- drop the clutch a little. The revs drop ever so slightly as it takes up drive

- dab the throttle slightly to compensate, as per usual

- the anti-stall twigs on (a micro-second late) that the revs had dropped, so kicks in with an extra 500 revs

- brain realises now revving too high, so foot instinctively lifts off

- anti-stall twigs on (a micro-second too late) that the revs had rocketed, so it kills its input

- revs drop to next-to-nothing. Foot instinctively dabs the throttle again.

- repeat 3-4 times as you kangaroo across the car-park like Our Aggie on her second lesson.

It's quite hard to reliably reproduce for someone else to diagnose, and I think I'm subconsciously learning to compensate for it. (The second awkward, and dangerous, consequence is that if you don't pull out from a junction with a bootful of revs you are very likely to crawl off into the mainstream traffic and... just...sit...there with what feels like 3 long seconds of the most awful turbo-lag as it tries to recover from eventually pulling out at about 450rpm).

But: the other day I found out how to re-produce it..., kinda:

With the car stationary and warm:

- dab the throttle to pick the revs up to 1000, or 1200, or 1300, or 1150 - anything to prove that one has a delicate right foot. The engine responds as expected.

- now put the clutch in, and repeat. The same delicate little prods now make the needle bounce up like it was a different engine suddenly woken up with an alarm. That's fairly repeatable.

It sounds really trivial (or sounds like I'm mad) but it is intensely annoying, and I can't believe that Ford really designed an engine management curve like that. Any pointers, please?

Thanks for your help,

Alan

Is this petrol or diesel?

Have you got Ford to check if there are any PCM updates?

I had something similar on my Focus 2.0 TDCi and it was fixed with a PCM update.

Thanks, Alex - it's petrol. I was actually sitting in the dealer's car park yesterday, but chickened out of going in and making an eejit of myself. It's actually re-assuring to hear that someone else has had a similar problem. The problem is very subtle, but definite. A PCM problem would sound plausible, as it has to be something the clutch position is affecting. (If I let the clutch out a bit, so that it isn't to the floor, but hasn't started to 'bite' either, the throttle responds correctly.) I'll pop back to the dealer, but actually go in this time...

Thanks for your help.

I described mine as unpredictable power/throttle to the dealer.

Most of the time it seemed to be ok, which meant taking a tech out to show them was difficult. But quite often I would either get far too much power or not enough.

So I could want to pull away slowly, but the car started revving too hard, you lift off and it lurches forward like you can't drive. Other times I would go to make a quick jump across a junction and the car would almost die on me, leaving me stranded in oncoming traffic waiting several seconds for the car to spring back in to life.

There was a PCM update available when they plugged the car in to IDS, and that sorted it for me.