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A poor earth is often the cause of this sort of misbehaviour and it’s a good place to start looking. Check the earthing points in the engine bay and around the area where the tail-lights are earthed in the cargo area.

You might need to lift some carpet or trim pieces, but when you find the earth points, make sure they’re tight and clean and not covered in corrosion. Don’t forget to check the tightness and cleanliness of the battery terminals, too.

Beyond that, these symptoms point to a problem with the car’s body computer which controls all these functions and many more.

When this computer starts to die, all sorts of weird and random flaws can occur. But try this first: Disconnect the battery of the car and let it sit overnight. Reconnect it next morning and keep a close eye on what happens. Sometimes this simple trick will reboot the body computer and normal service will be resumed. Best of all it’s free.

You need to be strategic with problems like this one, and not just throw new parts at the car which may or may not fix it.

That means the first thing to do is electronically scan the car to see if the on-board computer knows what’s wrong. Hopefully this information will lead you to either the ignition or fuel system and, from there, you can home in on the fault.

Ignition-wise, you may have a computer, wiring, spark plug issue or about a thousand other things on a modern, electronically-controlled car like this one. If the fuel system's at fault, you need to check things like the filter and fuel pump delivery pressure and volume and even the age of the fuel. Modern fuel doesn’t like to sit around for any length of time, and many’s the car that has been sidelined through petrol that has lost its mojo.

While the G35 Skyline is not a common car on Australian roads, its driveline is pretty well understood. Even so, finding a workshop that specialises in this make and model would be a good idea.

Australian dust is pretty amazing stuff. In some locations, it’s so fine, it can get past even the best rubber seals and into a car’s cabin. Problem is, once it's found its way into the heating and cooling plumbing on your car, every time you turn on the climate control or open the vents, you’re going to smell dust.

Cabin filters can help reduce this, but once the dust has entered the car, there’s very little chance of ever removing it completely.

However, if the smell is only present when you’re travelling on a gravel road, it might be that there’s a more obvious leak that is allowing the dust inside at that point in time. Check all the door and window rubbers, not forgetting the tailgate as the rear of the car is where the dust often enters.

If there are no rubber seals showing damage (or a tell-tale trail of dust) make sure each panel is properly aligned and that the weight of a spare-wheel rack (if you have one fitted) hasn’t distorted the tailgate hinges.

The other thing to do is to put the climate-control on recirculate and switch on the air-conditioning as this will pressurise the cabin and help keep the dust from being sucked into the car. It’s amazing how effective this can be.

Technically, the Captiva operates in all-wheel-drive all the time. But there’s a centre differential that apportions the drive between the front and rear axles to allow individual wheels to rotate at different speeds. If that centre coupling isn’t working properly it could cause the noise you’re hearing, possibly from the tyres that are skidding or skipping as they turn, or mechanical noises caused by what’s known as 'axle wind up'.

The Captiva normally operates much as a front-wheel drive vehicle and only engages the rear axle when the computer detects any wheel slip or loss of traction.

That’s a great question and suggests you shouldn’t take no for an answer in this case. Plenty of modern cars use a bit of oil (actually, all engines use some oil) thanks to the low-tension piston rings fitted to improve fuel economy. Swings and roundabouts. But 600ml of oil in 1000km is not something you can ignore.

Had the car always used this much oil, there’s a chance that this is 'normal' oil consumption. But the fact that the consumption has suddenly jumped up to the point where the engine ran out of oil makes me think that there might be a problem. Some oil consumption is normal, but it’s when the engine’s drinking habits change that you can have the beginning of a problem.

The fact Kia has admitted some engines had been fitted with poor quality piston rings, would make me think your car is one of the affected ones and should be fixed at Kia’s cost. I’d be curious to know what inspection the dealership conducted to assess your engine. One possibility would be to have the engine independently tested and assessed in terms of its cylinder compression and what’s called a leak-down test. This will give a much better idea of the condition of the engine’s internals and what’s needed.

Subaru’s own brochure blurb for the Crosstrek features the promise of off-roading family fun. With that in mind, the warranty will still apply even if you do get adventurous with the vehicle. That said, you might have warranty problems if it’s deemed that you’ve abused the vehicle by trying to take it places it was never designed to go. For example, while the Crosstrek is fine for finding a great mountain bike trail somewhere along a forestry road, trying to drive it up the Old Telegraph Track to Cape York through metre-deep river crossings is not within the Crosstrek’s design brief. Doubtless Subaru might argue you should have bought a high-clearance off-roader with a snorkel for such adventures.

The CVT is Subaru’s own work and design. While many other carmakers buy in transmissions from outside manufacturers, the CVT in the Crosstrek is an in-house effort. It’s generally agreed that Subaru’s CVTs are better than some other brands in terms of durability and reliability.

You could be looking at anything from a maladjusted or broken selector, to a transmission with low fluid level or even a transmission that has pretty much failed internally. All three possibilities can see a car with reverse and no other gears.

A transmission specialist is your first port of call, once you’ve checked the transmission fluid level yourself, of course. The owner’s manual will tell you how to do this.

It sounds like the fact that Haval’s warranty on this car of seven years/150,000km as a commercial vehicle (as opposed to unlimited kilometres for a privately operated vehicle) was not fully explained to you when you bought the car. Either that or you didn’t advise the dealer of your intentions for use of it.

However, I wouldn’t be too worried about the car falling to bits at the 150,000km mark. Modern cars (even cheaper ones) are pretty robust things these days, and provided they’re serviced properly, I don’t think 250,000km is too much to ask. That said, your car is a hybrid, so the life of the EV battery is probably the biggest question mark, and not something we can speculate on with any accuracy as the Havals using this tech aren’t old enough to have started failing yet.

The best bet is to be fastidious with your servicing and keep a close eye on the car’s habits and performance including its fuel economy. Because you’re driving the car a lot, you should be pretty well tuned in to the normal noises it makes and the way it feels to drive. Any change in this is when you need to start looking deeper.

Proton used to use engines it built under license from other manufacturers (notably Mitsubishi). In those days, there was a decent chance that a Proton rocker cover would have been interchangeable from another make or model that also used the same or similar Mitsubishi-designed engine.

Eventually, though, Proton progressed to the point where it was building and fitting engines of its own design, and the one in your Preve is that first of those. As such, you probably wouldn’t be able to switch it for another make and model’s cover, although you might find that other Proton models from the same era as your car (and which used the same engine) will, in fact, have rocker covers that can be mixed and matched. But be very careful, as even a different location for the EGR valve or breather tube might be the difference that renders the two covers non-interchangeable.

It depends on which particular version of the G10 you have. That’s because, around this time, LDV offered three different engines in vehicles badged as G10s. There were a pair of petrol engines – one turbocharged and one without a turbo – and a turbo-diesel. Both the turbocharged petrol and the turbo-diesel used a timing chain, while the non-turbo petrol (which had a capacity of 2.4 litres) used a rubber timing belt.

As such, the two engines with timing chains should not need maintenance in this area, while the 2.4 petrol’s timing belt will need to be replaced at whatever intervals LDV specified. Workshops dealing with these cars seem to recommend a belt-change interval of five years or 100,000km, whichever comes first.