Scottish Elises

Hey guys, seeing as i have just had my exige for two weeks now i still don't know what is 'normal' behaviour for the car...

This morning on my crawl to work i noticed some steam coming from the front left of the car, seemed to be from the radiator.. It only happened once the car was fully up to tmep - 91° on the display - and the car was very wet.. My thoughts were it was probably just water dripping off the clam onto the radiator and steam coming up and over the bonnet...

Is this something they all do or should i be worried? The car drove fine for the rest of the journey to work, which was only about 500m!!

Any opinions would be good.

cheers

Boyner

Completely normal - water lying on the radiator drying off

Aye - normal - just like the reactions of other people when it happens in traffic, laughing away at your 'overheating' Lotus.

Excellent, that's what i thought... I also had a chuckle to myself, thinking other people will be laughing, saying my engine is away to explode.... But hang on a minute, the engines in the back!! WTF!!

Cheers for the quick response guys.. Maybe just means i should only drive the car in the dry, when the sun's out...nah..

Thats probably the only technical question I could have answered

... but only cause I stopped driving the car and asked it in a panic the first time I noticed it

Watch for the next time you apply the brakes too, any water around the rad will roll into it and do it again

A split rad would be a bit more dramatic and continuous also the temp will rise off the scale PDQ

This happened to me for the first time in a queue on the middle of the Forth Bridge and I was more than a little panicked...

But it was all good

Cheers

Mark

The time to worry is when the wee puff of steam turns into a garden feature sized fountain when the radiator end cap lets go - happened to me several years ago at a busy set of traffic lights in the middle of Glasgow during rush hour - oh how I laughed as a 3 feet high jet of water burbled merrily over the front of the car blinding my view through the windscreen and gently splashing my head with boiling water as the roof was off

It clears the windscreen better than the scooshers

I am glad I am not the only one that thought.... 'okay is this normal', was at Newbridge roundabout during the morning commute, drew a few stares from others including me!

Ah, that's just the car testing you. Consider your new steed as a sulky teenager, and you'll both get along just fine.

j2 lot wrote:.....garden feature sized fountain when the radiator end cap lets go

Been there too, and baptised a passing cyclist! (A handy hint is not to wash the fluid off with a 2-litre bottle of lemonade, unless you like swatting angry wasps for 2 hours until the AA arrive. Always had a special fear of wasps, after what they did to my gran )