The coolant reservoir tank on your intercooler system works as an expansion tank, so it will have a high and low mark somewhere on it so you can keep the coolant at the correct level. It should be between the high and low marks when the engine is cold. Too high and coolant will be lost when the intercooler gets hot; too low and you won’t have enough coolant for the intercooler to work efficiently.

Modern engines are pretty coolant-specific these days, so you need to check your owner’s manual to see precisely what coolant is specified for the intercooler. It may be different to the one for the radiator because of the materials the intercooler is made from. That said, in the case of the LDV, I believe the correct coolant for the intercooler is the standard green type and is also used in the car’s engine cooling system.

On the face of it, there’s a lot wrong with the way you’re being treated here. For a start, if the car has already had the software upgrade for the accelerator calibration and it’s still playing up, I’d suggest there’s still something wrong with the throttle-by-wire system in place. So it needs to be looked at. Your car was sold new with a five-year/130,000km warranty, so this is really LDV’s problem to fix provided you’ve had the car serviced correctly and haven’t exceeded that mileage.

As such, the dealership should not be in a position to charge you an hourly rate to fix a warranty issue. As for the old 'they all do that’ nonsense, that’s an example of a dealership treating its customers like idiots. Cars do not die when you take off, regardless of how hard you accelerate, and to suggest that they do is an insult to your intelligence.

So give this dealer the flick and either try another one or – better yet – go straight to the top and contact LDV Australia’s customer service division. Australian Consumer Law is pretty unambiguous on this stuff.

Conventional wisdom suggests you’ve either had a major failure of the transmission which has torn the casing open and allowed the oil out, or you’ve run over something that has punched a hole in the gearbox and produced the same results. But depending on the size of the puddle under the car, you might simply have been losing transmission fluid through a breather or missing or loose fill-plug for some time and only just now noticed it when the vehicle rolled to a stop.

The reason the car will not go into gear or produce drive is that it requires fluid (oil) to do so. If that oil escapes (hence the puddle) then those gear selection and drive functions are lost.

Don’t be tempted to top up the gearbox and try to drive home. The unit could fail on you again at any time (depending on the size of the leak) and you risk damaging further a transmission that is low on fluid. This one sounds like a warranty (transmission failure) or insurance (smashed transmission housing) claim.