Holden Barina Problems

Based purely on your symptoms, a broken clutch is the most likely cause. When a clutch loses the ability to fully disengage the engine from the transmission (through either wear or damage) the gears can become very difficult to select. Sometimes they will engage with a crunch, at other times you may not be able to select them at all.

This is a different problem to a worn clutch which has lost its clamping ability and is slipping, but the ultimate fix is the same: A new clutch assembly.

The thing with problems like these is that you could be looking at a single fault or a group of problems that are each giving you a different symptom. Something could be getting hot in the engine management system that is causing the vehicle to shut down, and a good place to start looking would be the crank-angle sensor. When these get hot, they stop sending a critical signal to the engine’s computer and it just shuts down. After a short cool-down period, the sensor can often come back to life and away you go again.

Meantime, a stuttering idle and inconsistent engine speed on start-up would make a lot of mechanics check out the stepper motor which is part of the throttle mechanism and is responsible for setting the idle speed and allowing the engine to start.

Has your mechanic scanned the car or simply done a few basic checks? An electronic scan should be your next step if it hasn’t already been done.

Losing particular gears can be a symptom of internal transmission damage, but it can also indicate a simpler problem with the selector mechanism that joins the gear stick to the gearbox. However, if this was the case, you’d probably lose two gears on the same selector plane (such as first and second or third and fourth) not first and fifth which are at opposite ends of the shifter mechanism.

If there was internal gearbox damage, you’d possibly also be noting other noises and problems caused by the internal carnage, which makes me think the internal selector mechanism might be at fault. At which point, it’s probably a gearbox-out repair.

However, a transmission specialist that knows this gearbox well may have a different opinion and should be your first port of call. A specialist will save you time and money in the long run.

What make you think it’s the MAF (Mass Air Flow) sensor? If you’ve simply googled the symptoms and found a forum that suggests the MAF sensor, be very careful. These forums are not universally populated by people who have the first idea of what they’re talking about. True, some forums are great and wise, but simply pulling an answer out of a hat without even seeing the car is a road to nowhere in many cases.

It's also why the advice we’d have to give is to have the car looked at by a professional who will probably start by electronically scanning the car to see what fault codes have been logged by the computer. It’s possible the MAF sensor is, indeed, the problem, but it could also be about a thousand other things that need to be ruled out before you start spending money on new parts that may or may not solve your problem. The fact is, these symptoms could be anything from a dud spark plug to a loose wire, either of which would cost a lot less to fix than fitting a new MAF sensor.

There’s no hard and fast rule on this stuff, and the lifespan of a car will depend heavily on how it’s been serviced. Any car that has been ignored and abused will have a shorter run than the same make and model that has been meticulously maintained and serviced. And this difference can literally be hundreds of thousands of kilometres.

However, it’s also worth keeping in mind that this model Barina was a Daewoo by any other name (and not a particularly good one, at that) and was designed and engineered as such. Even a well maintained example is probably going to be getting pretty long in the tooth by the time 200,000km have been clocked up. Common faults include dramas with the engine and transmission and many owners simply find that the cost of repairs is more than the value of the vehicle itself. At which point they get scrapped and recycled.

That price is towards the top end of things for this particular make and model, but within reason given the low kilometres on the odometer. Make sure it has a full service record as, even though it hasn’t been used much, it will still have needed proper servicing if it’s to remain reliable.

This is not a good sign and suggests that you have a fairly major engine problem. Sometimes this can be caused by an automatic transmission’s oil cooler having split and emptying transmission fluid (oil) into the radiator’s coolant. If that’s the case, the transmission will also probably be damaged both mechanically and electronically.

Other causes are a catastrophic failure of the engine crankcase or – not quite as serious – a blown cylinder head gasket. But in either of these cases, the engine will need major repairs. The cost of which may exceed the actual value of the car.

Depending on the severity of the problem, a recycled, second-hand engine from a wrecked Barina of the same model might be a better option.

A manual car that jumps out of gear is usually a case of a worn gearbox. As the internals and gear selectors wear over time, they become loose, allowing the vehicle to jump into neutral.

The first check would be to see that the external linkage to the gearbox (a cable in the Barina’s case) is correctly adjusted and not about to fall apart. If that’s the case, you might find that the selector is not fully engaging each gear, and that’s why it’s jumping out of that gear. But beyond that, the problem is likely to be caused by wear inside the mechanical bits of the transmission.

First things first: If you can smell coolant when the engine is warmed up (or any other time) then you have a leak somewhere. Coolant leaks can be hard to spot as they are not always large and are often located in weird, hard to see places. But if you can smell it, it’s escaping the cooling system somewhere and you need to locate it and fix it.

If you have a slow leak, it’s possible you could drive for weeks without the car overheating, but eventually the engine will start to notice the low coolant level and run hotter as a result. Get it fixed now before you damage the engine. You should be fine to use a bit of tap-water (which will dilute the coolant in the rest of the system) until the leak is found, but don’t leave tap-water (or an incorrect or diluted mixture of water and coolant) in the radiator for the long term.

As for the brakes, the problem does, indeed, sound like warped rotors. Sometimes these can be machined back to true, but often they need to be replaced. Either way, replacing the brake pads at the same time is best practice. Worn pads on new rotors can make those nice, new rotors wear faster than they should.

First thoughts are that the stepper-motor (which controls the idle speed) is faulty. That would explain both the high idle at low engine temps and the stalling and stumbling as you roll to a stop. This component is really just a small electric motor and shouldn't be too expensive to replace.

But have the car scanned first to make sure there are no other obvious causes for this behaviour. A faulty engine temperature sensor or some other small component could also produce these symptoms.