Defender 90 Td5 very slow!!!

Hi All,

I'm new to this page and fairly new to the land rover world.

I've recently acquired a defender 90 Td5 pick up which (touch wood) is great! The only issue I'm finding is it's very slow. I hear most owners talking about cruising at 70mph and flat out around 90mph, I'm struggling to get 65mph and if I hit a hill she does not like it at all.

I've tried a few things that I've read in threads for example;
Changed oil and filter
Changed fuel filter
Freed up the boost actuator arm (this moves with pipe grips but not with fingers, I'm told if it's stuck I wouldn't hear the turbo boost, I can hear it whistling)
Changed exhaust (straight through)

Does anyone have any other suggestions of what I can check?

It's somewhat disheartening being over taken by all my friends Td5s and left behind on the main roads :,(

Many tanks

Un plug the maf sensor, if its any better get a new one

Air filter ? probably not that but worth doing anyway.

What john lad mentioned

mines actually surprising slow aswell at 70 it isn't really cruising I sit at 65mph but it feels like I'm giving it some beans to get it there

If it has a cable operated accelerator , check for slack.

zeaphod said:

If it has a cable operated accelerator , check for slack.

Click to expand...

A very good point.....Had this, was cursing ....blown turbo??? Engine fubarred??, ....blah blah blah.......Head under bonnet ........Slack as a slack thing having a day off....the damn slacker.....

Cheers..

Check all hoses for holes, splits etc.

You don't have a throttle cable, it is fly-by-wire. The TD5 is a good engine and should be comparatively sprightly. If it does not like hills I would suspect that it is not getting enough boost from the turbo. If you are confident the turbo is working correctly do as Dragonwalker says and check all the turbo hoses for leaks or splits. With a modern engine like a TD5 it is best plugging into a code reader to check for faults.

The fuel pump might be getting lazy. Mine picked up a few mph on hills and on the motorway when a new OEM fuel pump was fitted. I've also noticed that it gets a little slower just before I'm about to run out. The injector bodies only have a tiny hole in the side for the fuel to get in, so if it's not up to full pressure they won't be getting a full load, especially when you think that they'll have to fill up thirty or forty times a second when you're travelling at speed.

Assuming the boost hoses are not leaking my money is on the fuel pump not delivering full pressure. It may be getting lazy or the internal filter mesh may be clogged. Is the pump noisy?

How noisey should a fuel pump be? I can hear mine in the cab, could also hear it in the 90. Stage 2, engine off.

Fuel pumps all have personalities of their own. I'm on my third. The first one was original, and very quiet. I replaced it in the early months of 2013 because of an engine cutting out problem which seemed to be fuel starvation. Then I had a noisy one. At some points it was so noisy I carried a spare one in the back on long journeys in case it failed. Then I had a persistent non-running-failure-to-start problem which turned out to involve problems with the ECU, wiring loom, injector seals and a few other things, one of which was poor fuel pressure. So now I have a medium priced pump (a VDO Siemens, I think it was) which is also medium noisy. The very noisy one was a cheap special offer from a firm called Defender Bits which used to advertise on this forum. You got a pump, a pump seal and a filter for £100. Listening to it you could tell why. It lasted around 2 years though.