Hi eveverybody 🙂 ive owned my daily driver a4 b5 avant for 11 years in may. done 170,000 miles and its been unbelievably reliable only 2 minor issues that caused it to break down. It flooded itself and alternator needed replacing. For approx  a year its been cutting out sometimes when taken out of gear it cant seem to hold revs at tick over and stalls.  Sometimes its fine and doesn't happen and other times its quite frequent. A running theme seems to be occuring..  it starts fine and doesn't cut out say for a 50 mile drive from leeds to Manchester. I turn it off at my destination. Do my stuff, start the car after say 15 mins (still warm) the revs drop it stutters and stalls. Starts up fine but will do it again randomly. Its been a bit of a pain but not a major problem but last night it did its dodgy tick over thing and stalled but i couldn't restart it 😞 it was trying to fire but not quite. Now this morning it jus turns over no attempt to fire. Deffo has petrol lol !!!  Im a bit sad lol its 1 of the family haha and recently treated her to some a8 winter wheels and p zero tyres so not sure why she not happy haha 

Hello Iain, 

Many thanks for being in touch with the forum, and sorry to hear that the car is now not starting at all. 
Although of course, this is totally unacceptable, compared with your previously simply inconvenient erratic issues, this does mean that whoever will be working on the car will now have a positive cause to home in to, rather than having to suspect a variety of components which could cause the intermittent problems - this will be a ‘bonus’! 

Apologies for being negative and unhelpful to you with this Iain, but to try to diagnose the cause of the car not starting, without having access to it, and simply with knowledge that there is fuel in the tank, it’s going to be virtually impossible to isolate the actual cause from dozens of potential reasons. 

It can be relatively simple (but potentially dangerous unless you know exactly what you are doing) to confirm that fuel is getting to where it needs to, and/or you have a spark at the plugs - sorry, assuming it’s not a diesel, but from that point on, you simply aren’t going to get any further without the necessary experience, knowledge and equipment. 

Apologies, Iain, but I think this is where you will be in need of trusted local hands-on assistance with this.

Kind regards,

Gareth. 

crankshaft sensor  i would  change      kev

3 minutes ago, audia4b5kev said:

crankshaft sensor  i would  change      kev

plus change all fuel filters   to    

In my limited experience, if a quick pkug in with a code reader doesnt find any fault codes then look at the "dumb" components such as coil pack or MAF sensor.

The latter was failing on my 1.8 20v APK motor, random misfire and loss of power, would barely run then clear and go like a stabbed rat.

I was convinced that it was the coil pack, but while waiting from one to arrive from Lithuania or somewhere I found an online post about MAF causing misfire-like symptoms.

So I nicked the MAF off a known good 2000 Mk4 Golf 2.0 gti engine that has been hanging around and it cured it in one hit!

Not perfect, slight hesitation mid-range but driveable. Then I could source the correct MAF from the Bosch part number, I had the choice of mad money from Germany or a chinese knockoff from some Bulgarian on ebay...

The Bulgarian came good at £35 😄