Hello,

I was driving my Fabia Urban Wagon 1.2 16V on a motorway when, after about 300km, the engine suddenly stopped. Somehow I managed to bring the car to a safe area, and called for assistance. I was towed to the nearest workshop - needless to say, not a Skoda one. I was really disappointed, as my car has 25.000Km and has always been regularly serviced in Skoda workshops.

This workshop near Rome found the ignition coil on cylinder number three had melted down, also damaging the corresponding connector on the cable assembly going to the engine control unit.

This failure also caused a fuse to blow - the same fuse feeding the fuel pump, so that's why the engine came to a stop. They changed the ignition coil, the three spark plugs and the cabling.

All right - they fixed the car ( after 15 days and 620 EUR ... that cable assembly alone seems to cost as much as 170 EUR).

I went to the workshop, we tested the car - all right.

I took the motorway again - all right.

.......

After about 100Km, the engine management light came up!

........

The engine didn't stop, but I think it was running with two cylinders instead of three.

I could easily drive on the plains - fifth gear, about 3000 rpm.....but I hadn't enough power to face the hills. Any time I had to stop and then go again in first gear, I was unable to make the car start normally as I seemingly couldn't get above 2000rpm.

The only way to make the car go again was to turn the key in the off position, turn it in ON again, using the momentum of the electrical starting engine and then shifting to higher gears as quickly as possible...

I don't know how, but I managed to emerge from this nightmare and drive my car back home.

The day after I contacted my Skoda workshop.I tried to turn my car on and - although the engine management light was still ON - the engine was now operating correctly!!!

I brought my car to the workshop without any particular problem ( quite a long drive, enough for the engine to reach the regime temperature ).

Now for the funny part.

The Skoda technician told the engine management light was ON because there was an hystorical alarm of malfunctioning on cylinder number three, but anyway there was nothing wrong with it. He told probably the workshop on the motorway forgot to reset the ECU after doing the repair.

Anyway, he also adviced me to change the other two ignition coils - they seem to be the weak spot of this engine, and when one fails there is a high probability that the other two will follow in a few thousands of kilometers.

Now, my car is going OK - the engine works, no lampson - everything's fine (...so far...)

Now my doubts are:

1) do you think that an improper restart of the ECU after the kind of operation they did in Rome could explain - not only the engine management light coming up - but the kind of REAL malfunctioning I have experienced during the second part of my journey? In other words, do you think a false ( = not cleared ) error indication in the ECU could bring a perfectly functional engine to behave erratically ?

2) Is it real that those ignition coils are prone to failure? Being common to other , more popular, VW and Audi cars, if this was true there should be somewhere a statistic and a MTTF (mean time to failure) number ....

Thanks for listening to my woes, and for your help with my questions....

Regards

Antonio

Edited 24 January, 200917 yr by Antarta
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I doubt the non-cleared error would cause a further problem.

The ignition coils are a bit of a known weak spot on many VAG cars. I would replace the two remaining coils, get all the errors cleared, and see how it goes.

By the way, your English is very good.

I never thought I'd see concatenated on Briskoda.

Thanks guys,

I'll change the two other coils ( and touch wood )

Antonio