On a fine spring morning while driving into work with the Renault Zoe R240, I suddenly heard a loud metallic “clonk” and then some ominous grinding noises, accompanied by knocking sounds when rolling. I had to stop the car straight away and subsequently opened the bonnet to try to assess the cause for the problem.
Something worrying became visible right at first sight: The whole drivetrain unit seemed to be leaning to the right side. In this picture, you can best see it when looking at the black top cover of the heat pump (where the Renault logo is visible). This unit should be aligned in a straight line with the cross member, but as you can see it is way off. The next picture will be taken from just behind the cooling liquid reservoir.
And here we can see that indeed the whole drive unit dropped: A screw which would normally link the motor mount with the drivetrain is loose. This alone would normally not cause the whole unit to drop, there must be other problems down the line, but what we know now is that the car has a serious problem and is not driveable anymore. Calling the roadside assistance was inevitable.
As it was a very busy evening on the roads, it took quite some time for the flatbed truck to come. It got quite late and dark until finally the truck came to bring my Renault Zoe home into the barn.
The next day, we put the Renault Zoe on the lift to assess the damage from below the car. But first of course: Pull the service lockout of the high voltage battery for safety reasons!
And here the whole damage gets visible: The whole cast motor mount just snapped!
A subsequent problem was that the drive unit fell straight on the left driveshaft, damaging the rubber boot of the driveshaft, causing the lubricant to spill everywhere. That was the cause for the grinding noise.
I don’t want to blame Renault for this problem though: My suspicion is that when I mounted the whole drivetrain unit back in 2020 after the complete disassembly and exchange of the unit, I might have made a mistake with the torque or maybe should have applied some locking fluid (loctite). So probably the top screw I showed before got loose and the whole weight of the unit got displaced on the bracket, which eventually made it break.
So as a next step I got on to Renault to order the required spare part, the bracket in the red circle with the part number 112532098R.
The reply from Renault was that this part was not available in any spare parts warehouse in Europe, so they would have to make a factory order in France with unknown delivery date. This undermines my assumption that this is not a known or regular problem with these cars, so it could well be linked to my own mistake. As I needed the car, the long leadtime wasn’t an option for me, so I started to search for alternative sources such as used parts from brakers or second hand parts dealers. But even this route proved to be difficult. I found one single suitable part on Ebay, located in Lithuania. I didn’t know if the offer was genuine, but I tried my luck by ordering the part though Ebay.
And believe it or not: A few days later I got a package from a sender in Lithuania!
Here you can see the new (used) part in comparison with the old part (on the right side) with the snapped part on the bottom.
While mounting the new part I took good care to replace the screws and to torque everything to factory values. Luckily, the damaged driveshaft was readily available and quite easy to replace too.
In the end, within a few days luckily the car was again back on the road! What an adventure…
