I was coming back from holiday with my family in the car when the Fiats temperature gauge started rapidly rising to the red. I noticed this straight away but had to wait around 10 seconds before I could pull onto the hard shoulder due to some traffic cones blocking the hard shoulder off.

During all this, it hit the red in around 5 seconds of it starting to rise, stayed there for around 3, then dropped back down and the engine cut out. As a result my timing belt melted and has cost a small fortune to repair the damage its done to the engine.

What is frustrating is that I got the timing belt replaced when I got the car 18 months ago. Had I realised that water pumps could fail like this I would of got that replaced to!

Is this short notice of a problem with the water pump typical of cars? Or was there possibly a fault with the temperature sensor. Even without the cones I don't really think I would have had time to pull safely into the hard shoulder and turn off the engine.

Should have changed the pump at the same time as the belt as they're known to go and it's recommended that you do that at the same time. Unfortunately hindsight is a wonderful thing

Tbh I'm surprised that the engine went long enough after the failure to allow it to overheat and that the belt didn't just snap or shear as soon as the pump failed.

Bringing this thread back from the dead I'll just share my recent experience!

I had my timing belt done back around 90,000 miles and the water pump wasn't done. Can't remember back whether it was given as an option for me to give the go-ahead on, but either way it wasn't done.

An the other month, on around 126,000 miles it failed when I was on the M4. Almost immediate shut down from pottering along perfectly fine to zero power, no power steering and not a hell of a lot of brakes!

Got recovered back home and straight to the local garage.

£1750 later and it had new water pump, timing belt, injectors and all sorts of other engine bits and it's back running again.

However now, and it's going back in to get checked out, but it has a lot more vibration than normal on idle and when decelerating. Did a bit of web-bashing and there are lots of potential causes but none that hit the nail on the head.

Anyway, it's back and it's drivable, but was a massive expensive pain! Lesson learned, get the water pump done!