A3 Sportback 170bhp smoking like a B@tch!!

[markymarkG]

So,  new to the forumn so hello chaps..

A3 2.0Tdi 170 sportback

Any how, had the car roughly six months now. its been mapped and its like the proverbial off the shovel..  Noticed a bit of smoke and a slight miss fire mostly in 3rd under hard acceleration. Went to get the map checked out as local garge mentioned it may be a crap map.... mapper said the original map was locked ans couldn't access it.

The problem has got worse now. The car drives great though.

So, here goes with the probs...     When i start the car in a morning, it takes alot longer to sart and sounds very lumpy. The longer the car has been left standing the worse the problem gets, the amount of smoke that comes out is worse also the longer the car stands also. even cycling the glowplugs numerous times doesn't help with starting either. Once strated and the smoke has gone the engine runs as it should. Once warmed up and stopped at junctions/lights, white smoke can be seen coming out literally in the mirror and going past the car it can be that bad.  sometimes if your lucky it won't do it and the engine pitch is fine then it will start a bit lumpy and the smoke starts again.

It's deffinately fuel related as you can smell it quite strong especially if you've just pulled up and reversing into a parking spot and it's really heavy on fuel. If i get 150 miles out of £30 of diesel, I'm doing well.

I'm no mechanic and I don't live on Daddy's yacht so any pointers on problems on these engines would be appreciated before the local garage shoot the parts connon at it

Thanks Mark

[cliffcoggin]

It sounds as if you have clapped out the engine with your mapping tweaks and some hard driving. Unfortunately a short engine life is the price for high performance.

[markymarkG]

18 minutes ago, cliffcoggin said:

It sounds as if you have clapped out the engine with your mapping tweaks and some hard driving. Unfortunately a short engine life is the price for high performance.

I didn't have the car mapped, like that when I bought it. Never driven it hard either, Just know what a standard 170bhp is like.

Its full service history, engine is fine. Its had a health check before i bought it and its got excellent compression and also had a leak down test so it's got nothing to do with a clapped out engine. Noticed the very slight miss when overtaking a slow car......doesn't do it under normal driving.

 

[Magnet]

Hello Mark,

Have you sought advice/had on inspection of the car, carried out by a diesel specialist, rather than an ‘ordinary’ garage? If not, that would be my first route.

Can we take it the ‘on start up’ smoke is whitish and smells of diesel? If so, possible injector issues? 
Hopefully the car doesn’t consume any coolant -? 
Perhaps you could come back to us.

Cliff does raise a point - no one really goes to the expense of getting a car mapped unless they drive ‘enthusiastically’ ! - being polite - so whoever buys such a car must be attracted to it for a similar reason, otherwise they are likely to move on to another original example. 

Kind regards,

Gareth. 

[cliffcoggin]

Mark.

Whether it was you that had the car mapped or a previous owner is beside the point that it's been mapped. Nobody does that without using the extra power and thus causing extra wear.

Be that as it may, it's good you have had some testing done which should eliminate compression and other mechanical faults at the top of the engine, so we can move on to other possibilities. What mileage has the car done? Is it losing coolant? Has the EGR valve been cleaned? Has the DPF been regenerated recently?

[Stevey Y]

Hi not to put to finer point to this, why would anyone buy a fifteen year old car thats been mapped, I can only assume that it must have been an attractive proposition to you at the time, have you any idea how much extra power that map produced, do you know the original mapping agent as most companies that do this process properly cost a lot of money because they do things like delete the original map but back it up in case of future problems and use one of the other map paths in the ECU, I have even seen case in point one of my neighbours sons with a year old Vauxhall Corsa that his dad had bought him so he could commute back and forth to university, tops up one of his computer sciences mates had lifted a remap off the internet and installed that, junior mentioned none of this until a rather irate engineer who had diagnosed the vehicle came out and informed his dad that they can't fix the car under warranty because it had been interfered with which voided the warranty, end result was a new ECU £2000 plus fitting, there are so many John Wayne mappers out there it makes me cry, why do you think most automotive software writers are on about two hundred grand a year, anything outside that and the people are just playing at it as they don't get two years testing and a Dyno set up to fine tune what they have written.

Steve.

[markymarkG]

21 hours ago, cliffcoggin said:

It sounds as if you have clapped out the engine with your mapping tweaks and some hard driving. Unfortunately a short engine life is the price for high performance.

I didn't have the car mapped, like that when I bought it. Never driven it hard either, Just know what a standard 170bhp is like.

Its full service history, engine is fine. Its had a health check before i bought it and its got excellent compression and also had a leak down test so it's got nothing to do with a clapped out engine. Noticed the very slight miss when overtaking a slow car......doesn't do it under normal driving.

 

[Magnet]

Hello Mark,

Appreciate that which you made clear in your early post, and repeating - I would strongly stick with my original advice.

Kind regards,

Gareth. 
p.s. ‘Full service history’ can mean it’s spent half a day in a workshop once a year ( at most), and who knows how it’s been driven for the other 364 1/2 days? 

[cliffcoggin]

3 hours ago, markymarkG said:

I didn't have the car mapped, like that when I bought it. Never driven it hard either, Just know what a standard 170bhp is like.

Its full service history, engine is fine. Its had a health check before i bought it and its got excellent compression and also had a leak down test so it's got nothing to do with a clapped out engine. Noticed the very slight miss when overtaking a slow car......doesn't do it under normal driving.

 

Mark.

Repeating word for word what you wrote earlier does not help. We can only work on the information you supply and so far that has been sparse, so I ask again about mileage, coolant loss, EGR and DPF.

Additionally I don't see anything terribly unusual about your fuel consumption. Assuming diesel is £1.50 per litre, 150 miles on £30 worth of diesel equates to 150 miles on 20 litres, which equates to 150 miles on 4.4 gallons, which equates to 34.1 mpg. That's not too shabby depending on how the car is driven and how many miles it has done. I never accurately checked my own but I believe it to be 35-40 mpg.

[Stevey Y]

On 2/25/2022 at 9:20 PM, markymarkG said:

So,  new to the forumn so hello chaps..

A3 2.0Tdi 170 sportback

Any how, had the car roughly six months now. its been mapped and its like the proverbial off the shovel..  Noticed a bit of smoke and a slight miss fire mostly in 3rd under hard acceleration. Went to get the map checked out as local garge mentioned it may be a crap map.... mapper said the original map was locked ans couldn't access it.

The problem has got worse now. The car drives great though.

So, here goes with the probs...     When i start the car in a morning, it takes alot longer to sart and sounds very lumpy. The longer the car has been left standing the worse the problem gets, the amount of smoke that comes out is worse also the longer the car stands also. even cycling the glowplugs numerous times doesn't help with starting either. Once strated and the smoke has gone the engine runs as it should. Once warmed up and stopped at junctions/lights, white smoke can be seen coming out literally in the mirror and going past the car it can be that bad.  sometimes if your lucky it won't do it and the engine pitch is fine then it will start a bit lumpy and the smoke starts again.

It's deffinately fuel related as you can smell it quite strong especially if you've just pulled up and reversing into a parking spot and it's really heavy on fuel. If i get 150 miles out of £30 of diesel, I'm doing well.

I'm no mechanic and I don't live on Daddy's yacht so any pointers on problems on these engines would be appreciated before the local garage shoot the parts connon at it

Thanks Mark

Hi if you look at the facts no one could offer the magic cheap diagnosis based on the information you have given, no codes, no map information, whatever problems you have they don't sound like the sort of engine problems that one would normally encounter, no one is acusing you of having a bad map downloaded but its difficult to quantify your problems without the milage and as I said any codes that might be present, from my perspective if I was buying a car like that and it had robust milage and had been remapped I would have walked away as the previous owner may not have been kind when driving it, the health check was six months ago thats a long time in the life of an engine and as Cliff pointed out are you using any water or oil, these are not random irrelevant questions but are based on experience gained by asking other users of this forum often with a favourable outcome, without any usable information the question you are asking is how long is a piece of string, I don't think anyone on here knows the answer to that.

Steve.

[rickyr65sl]

On 2/25/2022 at 9:20 PM, markymarkG said:

So,  new to the forumn so hello chaps..

A3 2.0Tdi 170 sportback

Any how, had the car roughly six months now. its been mapped and its like the proverbial off the shovel..  Noticed a bit of smoke and a slight miss fire mostly in 3rd under hard acceleration. Went to get the map checked out as local garge mentioned it may be a crap map.... mapper said the original map was locked ans couldn't access it.

The problem has got worse now. The car drives great though.

So, here goes with the probs...     When i start the car in a morning, it takes alot longer to sart and sounds very lumpy. The longer the car has been left standing the worse the problem gets, the amount of smoke that comes out is worse also the longer the car stands also. even cycling the glowplugs numerous times doesn't help with starting either. Once strated and the smoke has gone the engine runs as it should. Once warmed up and stopped at junctions/lights, white smoke can be seen coming out literally in the mirror and going past the car it can be that bad.  sometimes if your lucky it won't do it and the engine pitch is fine then it will start a bit lumpy and the smoke starts again.

It's deffinately fuel related as you can smell it quite strong especially if you've just pulled up and reversing into a parking spot and it's really heavy on fuel. If i get 150 miles out of £30 of diesel, I'm doing well.

I'm no mechanic and I don't live on Daddy's yacht so any pointers on problems on these engines would be appreciated before the local garage shoot the parts connon at it

Thanks Mark

First thing I’d be looking at is the fuel system… injectors, pump etc 

common signs of failing injector/s can be poor starting when cold and getting better once up to temp, white smoke from exhaust, misfiring, juddering and generally running lumpy 

Impossible to give a proper diagnosis without being there myself but from what you’ve mentioned that’s where I would definitely start 

[cliffcoggin]

I fear its wasted advice Richard. The OP has not been back since we gave him advice he did not want to hear.

[Stevey Y]

2 hours ago, rickyr65sl said:

First thing I’d be looking at is the fuel system… injectors, pump etc 

common signs of failing injector/s can be poor starting when cold and getting better once up to temp, white smoke from exhaust, misfiring, juddering and generally running lumpy 

Impossible to give a proper diagnosis without being there myself but from what you’ve mentioned that’s where I would definitely start 

Hi if you read the full thread according to matey there was nothing wrong with anything you suggested checking and despite requesting milage and any codes that may be present he still held the health check line and claimed to have never driven the car hard despite claiming it went like a rocket with the remap, Cliff and Gareth gave it a more than fair go, unfortunately it would appear that you to are wasting your breath, all good suggestions made by yourself which I would endorse, and as they say, what we have here is failure to communicate, there are some men you just can't reach.........

Steve.