I have a VW Polo 2001 and over the past couple of months it has been randomly cutting out. It seems to happen not long after I start the car and start driving. It starts absolutely fine again but was wondering if anyone has any ideas of why it might be happening?
If its the model that has the ignition coil on the firewall they are shockers for the coils cracking the casing open and failing. Try spraying the coil with water when the motors running, if it cuts, its buggered.
noswalg,
Dec 24, 12:20am
I had a 2000 Golf that had the same issue, would start/run fine when it was cold but once it warmed up it would randomly cut out sometimes and i'd have to wait a few minutes before it would start again. Turned out to be a faulty crank angle sensor, yours might be starting to fail. Mine got consistently worse over the course of a year.
marte,
Dec 25, 7:23am
I have scrapped a lot of car coils for their Copper. Nearly half of them are so messed up inside its a wonder they even work. 1/10:simply should not work at all. These are out of scrapped cars.
No oil in several of them, really big char marks and some have just been burnt out completely.
It seems they should be absolute vertical and not mounted on the motor and not in a hot place either.
franc123,
Dec 25, 2:29pm
Pity that manufacturers disregard that last part, with coil over plug systems its unavoidable being right on top if the engine, and often with covers over them! The amount of heat soak they suffer from is huge. Not many coils made in the last 20 or so years have oil in them, they're transformer type, they MUST be running hotter than the old wet coils given their output. That's why its so critical to change plugs at the right times but that doesn't happen because customers baulk at the cost, they'd rather pay for plugs, coils AND diagnostics when the coils finally die. They've become an out of sight out of mind component.
intrade,
Dec 25, 3:22pm
franc123 did you see toyota have codes for coil on plug vvti i pulled a code on that 2001 platz 1.5vvti you could hear it was not running smooth on old plugs code was something in the form of over-ampere on coil. changed plugs cleared code and it was not comming back the code. only thing on coil on plug causing overload can be the plugs or the coil is already failing if it comes back. dont know if the code would still set as i dont know how it calculates the code, if the coil it self sends the info to ecm in sens wire or what.
franc123,
Dec 25, 3:40pm
Yes the can log codes if misfire is detected or otherwise it detects malfunction in the circuit. Usually for open circuit though, I've not personally come across one that's logged a specific code that would be triggered by back EMF in the primary coil circuits. What was the code number?
intrade,
Dec 25, 4:12pm
cant tell you the code i whiped out the software a few times on my android phone to try and make it work on android 6.0 to no avail i since got a 4.4 android tablet to only use the idaig x431 launch scantool software. that code was on my nexus 5 , all i remember it had over ampere and specific coil number refering to the code.
franc123,
Apr 30, 6:37am
Still pretty useful to have it tell you that. You would check plugs straight away in that case, it shows how sensitive the ECM's are to these things now.
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