Chicken Drumstick wrote:

lightning wrote:

l have had a Defender TD5 but have no experience with the "Puma" 2.2/2.4

Today l test drove a lovely 30,000 mile 2012 110 XS Commercial. It drove really well except for a couple of things.

First if you take your foot off the gas and then put it back on there's a delay before anything happens, then a jolt as the power comes back in. l was able to work around it by not taking my foot completely off the gas, where possible.

Second there was a lot of transmission clatter or "lash" as the Australians call it, when changing gear. Also if l wasn't careful it would kangaroo a bit when the next gear was selected.

Apart from that it drove well. There didn't seem to be any "slack" in the drive train when going on and off the gas while in gear.

I believe these engines respond very well to a remap. Would a mild/stage 1 remap also improve drive ability, as in reducing the issues l had with smoothness.

Performance seemed fine. And the actual gear change was positive with no problems.

Obviously over the internet this is super hard to diagnose if there is an issue or not. Best bet would be to go and drive another one, even one you aren't interested it, but it'll give you a good benchmark comparison. So if it is the same or worse than this one, you know that this one is probably normal.

And I would massively disagree with almost all the replies here. They are not smooth and renown for being quite jerky to drive.

In the family my Uncle has 2 Puma's on the farm. Both bought brand new. One is a 12 plate that has about 16,000 miles on it (low mileage). The other is a 65 plate with about 12,000 miles on it. They drive identical in terms of gear change and drivetrain and both are jerky as f***!

This is easy to compare to other non Puma Land Rover on the farm and in the family, which currently totals somewhere in the region of 10 other Land Rovers. We have also been in and driven many other Puma's as well as knowing lots of people with Puma's in the local Land Rover club, of which we are all active members and my Uncle and my parents were founding members of.

I'm not saying a Puma is terrible and you can learn to drive around the limitations, but compared to an LT-77 or R380 equipped model, the gear change is not smooth and nor is the throttle.

I've not heard anyone successfully solving these issues either. A remap will not improve it. The 65 plate mentioned above was remapped with some other mods to 190bhp by Alive Tuning. They really don't like you trailing the throttle pedal when you change gear, i.e. even just resting your foot on the throttle pedal at the top of the travel, something you can do with other vehicles such as any other Land Rover 90 prior to the Puma or even your Jimny. If you lift your foot clear off the throttle pedal while you are changing gear it'll improve it, but 1st to 2nd and 2nd to 3rd will require practice and patient to get smooth.

The gearbox shouldn't really be noisy aka "lash" as you say. But if you make the changes jerky, then yes it will seem like it is.