Ground to a halt, won't start

[DorsetTwo]

Owned our Rav4 for two years now, never had any problems until last Friday.

About 100m after leaving work the car made a metallic grinding, ratchety, rattling noise underneath for around 4 seconds then it just stopped. Tried to start it, starter motor was turning over, but car wouldn't start. Further couple of attempts made but then rang breakdown assistance. Breakdown arrived, handheld diagnostic was showing it was starved of fuel, so suggested a fuel leak. Judged it unfixable so called for low loader.

Car recovered to our local trustworthy mechanic but he has so far been unable to get it started. Had diesel and electrical specialists look at it but the only suggestion so far is to change the fuel pump and see if that works, or to recover it to a Toyota dealer.

Really scratching our heads here. Any ideas? Feel free to ask for more info. Car is just coming up to 100k mileage.

Loath to start replacing expensive parts in the hope of a fix, especially if we are looking in the wrong places.

 

Cheers

[daveh_rav4]

Does your Rav4 have a cam belt?  If so... whip the valve cover off or look through the oil filler if on the cover, turn the engine over and see if the valve gear is turning.  If inot... then probably a cam belt broken.  Some Toyota engines are 'none interferance' i.e. if the belt breaks the valves won't hit the top of the pistons sometimes causing catastprohic damage!  Hopefully it will be something else...

[DorsetTwo]

No cam belt, timing chain. Checked all timing issues as far as they can.

[DorsetTwo]

Just to update:
It was an injector failure. Replaced, lots of jiggery pokery with the computer to get it set up properly, but now up and running again.
Mechanic reckons a Toyota dealer would have wanted to replace all four of them, not sure how true that is, but that would have made the car pretty much a write off for us.

[Colourd]

Interesting

So was a new injector put in or ? .....................

[DorsetTwo]

Yes the faulty injector was replaced.

[Byzii]

Thank you for the update! From the symptoms I would never even start looking at injectors so that's a surprise. Isn't the engine able to run with only 3 of them compensating for the failed one? And metallic grinding sound.. Sheesh, it's good you got it fixed!

And you're right about dealership, usually they say that all 4 injectors need to be replaced and that's quite an expensive job if you aren't ready for it.