General

Don't you just love it when intelligent people seem to lazily put the world to rights? Take a look at Structured Procrastination. John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford wrote some essays "defending yet more life choices generally seen as faults". I'll get through them all at some point.

This is just a quick note that I hope Google will index for the benefit of anyone else with the same problem: I tried to Google it when I first suffered with this irritation, but found no hits. Hopefully, this will help someone.

I bought a second-hand Daewoo Lacetti 1.6 SX. Lovely car, apart from one problem: an irritating knocking sound heard when the car was driven over uneven road surfaces, speed bumps or pot-holes. On affected vehicles, the sound emanates from the right off-side front quarter as heard from the cabin, and only occurs when the full weight of the engine drops down after a bump in the road. It is impossible to apply this force when the car is up on the ramp, so get the mechanic to test drive it hard with you.

The investigations made by various garages lead to replacement of (in order) stabilizer (anti-roll bar) bushes, right shock absorber, lower arm and steering rack. This was after 7 visits. Beware of misdiagnoses of this fault (although you might be glad that other faults are fixed, especially under warranty)!

The actual cause of the problem is well-known to Chevrolet, but because they do not deal with mechanics at even their main dealers, this crucial information was not passed on for many weeks. Have the hydro engine mounts checked. These are not like standard rubber ones on other cars, which clearly separate if faulty, but contain many components which produce the knocking sound on compression.

This fault affects both the 1.6 and (rarer) 1.8 models. Feel free to get in touch if I can help you in any way.