Hi all,i just traded in my rather dire alfa 156 against a rather nice octavia ambiente estate ( '51 plate, 91,000 miles), but i'm rather disappointed in the performance.

when i test drove it, it was on little country lanes near the dealers, and the performance was as sprightly as i expected, but now i've picked up the car, and had chance to get it up to motorway speed, it seems to have the performance of an 850 mini!

as you accelerate down the slip road, the engine pulls strongly, but as soon as you hit 3000 rpm, its like hitting a rev limiter, or a massive flat spot.

once you coax the car up to 70 mph , she seems fine, but if you want to pass anything, there's no go in the car at all, light throttle openings, foot to the floor, it just crawls up to 75. if you come across a slight incline, it actually drops below 70, unless you stick your foot to the floor.

this is my first deisel car, but i've driven passats and sharans in work a fair bit, and these are flying machines, now i understand that my octavia has quite a few horsepower less, but this performance seems ridiculous.

i just thought i'd ask on here to see if these symptoms point to a common problem, or an easy fix, otherwise its take it back to the dealer i bought it from.

many thanks in advance for any replies.

You could have posted this in 'Ask a Tech'

Sounds very much like an air mass meter to me, about

Sounds like you have a MAF meter problem or a boost leak.

My 110TDi flies past 100mph even without the tuning box and hills don't bother it at all. I can maintain 60mph in 5th up any motorway hill with the car loaded up, mountain bikes on the roof and a 1200kg caravan on the back.

Cheers

Lee

thanks for the replies, as you've both highlighted the MAF (i thought i'd left MAF problems behind when i ditched my alfa!), i've done a search on this site, and read up a bit, the lack of acceleration through the gears, the general lack of power, and the resetting when you turn the engine off then back on, seems to all point to the MAF.

looks like i have a trip back to the dealers after work on monday!......lets hope they dont put up a fight and just fix it!

If its resetting when the igniton turns off and back on again it may also be a sticking turbo or N75 valve (just something to mention to them).

just thought i'd give you all an update, i took the car back to the dealers, and initial diagnosis was the MAF, and after the mamager swapped a known serviceable one off a car on the forecourt, we shot off for a test drive, but no joy, after a couple of miles the same symptoms, so its booked in next week to get the full diagnostics , they were muttering about the turbo and associated valves.

just wish they'd done it before i bought it!

I would have thought that either the VNT vanes are sticking in the turbo leading to an overboost fault which requires an ignition reset to clear or quite possible one of the pipes going to the N75 valve has come off or got kinked. This can happen after a cambelt is done as you need to drop the engine mount off and sometimes the engine tilts at such an angle that it pops off.

I have a virtually identical car - 2001 (y) 110TDi estate

I was going to make a post about my car this morning, but it sounds identical :-( Was going up a hill, following a van, which turned off, so I dropped to 3rd gear and put my foot down. As I did, it pulled (somewhat slowly) to a fraction over 3000 rpm when it just stopped - like a rev limiter. I changed into 4th, gained a bit more speed and then dropped back to 3rd, but it refused to pull any more. Back into 4th and 5th but it was totally lacking in performance.

I have vag-com on a laptop at home, so tonight I will connect up and see if the MAF is reporting any faults. I had it replaced a few months ago by a dealer who said that was problem.

How much money are looking when it comes to leaking boost hoses, n75 valves, etc? (just bought a house, so not as if I have loads of cash to fix it).

Matt

Seems to be more of the same here:

http://www.tyresmoke.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/281608/page/0/fpart/all/vc/1

that link makes interesting reading, seems like its a fairly common problem.

I checked on vag-com last night, and it showed the intermitten fault for the MAF.... cleared the code. Same poor performance on the drive into work this morning, but left laptop at home, so can't check the code has come back.

I guess I have to get the dealer to have a look :-(

just thought i'd give you all an update, got the car back from the garage today, after 3 days of checking all the bits and bobs already mentioned and it having no effect, the garage got onto skoda technical, and after seeing the fault codes said it was the turbo.

so now i have a car with a lovely new shiny turbo on it (i think it was just over

just thought i'd give you all an update, got the car back from the garage today, after 3 days of checking all the bits and bobs already mentioned and it having no effect, the garage got onto skoda technical, and after seeing the fault codes said it was the turbo.

so now i have a car with a lovely new shiny turbo on it (i think it was just over

luckily , as i bought my car from a skoda dealers it came with a used car warranty, and the only thing i had to pay for was a bit of petrol for the courtesy car. (which i kind of diasagree with on principal, but couldn't be bothered to argue over