Short hospital-shift hops and a turbo that never gets hot
Upper Tooting Road and the High Street form a red route with bus lanes and a 20mph limit, and Wandsworth applies 20mph to residential streets as well. Tooting Broadway is congested with buses and pedestrians for much of the day, and the roads around St George's Hospital and Blackshaw Road stay busy at all hours with ambulances and drop-offs. A diesel doing shift runs and short local trips in that environment spends its life at low load, which lets soot and oil mist bake onto the variable geometry vanes.
The parking situation adds to it. Controlled parking zones around Tooting Broadway operate six days a week, with some eight-hour bays near the hospital, so cars tend to be moved in short hops rather than driven properly. That is the worst possible pattern for a turbocharger and for the particulate filter behind it. The car then feels flat at one point in the rev range, or drops into limp mode on Trinity Road when you finally ask it for something.
Because stopping and loading are tightly restricted on the A24, a car that loses power there is a problem in itself. If that happens, get somewhere safe and call us rather than pressing on. In the workshop we log requested against actual boost on the road, smoke test the intake and boost pipework, check actuator travel and the boost sensor, and measure exhaust back pressure before deciding whether the turbo or the filter is the cause.
Shaft play is then measured against the manufacturer's figure for your unit, which is what decides the question. Where a replacement is needed we quote a new unit and a properly remanufactured one in writing, renew the oil feed, flush the intercooler and boost pipes, fit a new air filter and change the oil to specification. Collection and recovery are both available from Tooting, and the workmanship carries a 3-month warranty.