Hello,

I was wondering whether someone has experienced similar problems to what I'm currently having.

So I took my car into garage because I had the check engine light come up and the car was behaving really weirdly. Even when idling, it kept shaking quite a lot and it felt like the engine was going to switch off in a min. Like an engine misfire. The guy who looked at it said it was the coil that needed changing and some of the spark plugs were in a really good condition, however, he has done a test on the engine and said it's in a really good condition.

Things replaced:

- 4 x Coil

- 4 x Spark Plugs

I then drove the car for a week or so until it started doing the same thing again. This time they told me it could have been the spark plugs as they don't have a way to check them so.. They replaced them once again, tested the car and it was fine. I can confirm. Until.. Yet again, drove it for a week and now it's doing it again! This is doing my head in, I'm going to have to visit them for the 3rd time in 3 weeks with same issue.

Has anyone experienced anything like that in the past or knows what the problem could be? 

Hello Mick, 

Sorry to hear of your issue. 

So they have now changed 4 coil packs and changed the original spark plugs twice. 

I think it would stretch the imagination a bit to believe that 3 sets of spark plugs, including 2 new sets could all be faulty! 

The garage must be capable of establishing which cylinders are suffering from a misfire - it would not be all of them, or the engine would not run at all.

So question to them is which cylinder/s is affected. 

New coil packs they may be, but reliably serviceable they may not - depending on the brand. Whatever, it should be possible to swop the coil packs around to establish whether the misfire stays on the same cylinder or not. It should not be rocket science for an average garage. 

If new coil packs and plugs are serviceable, but problem returns, then I would be wanting to check the wiring to each of the coil packs to see if there was an intermittent bad connection/partial break, which would account for the problem. If there is, then it’s possible that actually working on the engine may improve or disturb a poor connection, but a poor connection it continues to be, and will  continue to cause issues. 

The above can only be a guess, since I’m sure you will appreciate it’s impossible to diagnose anything at a distance. 

Perhaps you could keep us posted on developments Mick.

Kind regards,

Gareth. 

 

1 hour ago, Magnet said:

Thanks a lot for your reply Gareth. I'm going to ring them to book it in so most likely the car will end up in garage on Tuesday. I will keep you posted once I know a bit more. Cheers

 

Hello Mick,

Thanks for coming back on this.

I think if this were mine I would be looking for another trusted local garage.

Kind regards,

Gareth.