I had a coilpack fail a few years ago - in fact it failed only a week or so after I bought my VRs. I was driving along the M40, and she dropped onto 3. I was pretty sure it was a spark failure rather than EFI / sensor failure - I can sort of identify these things quite well, after 20 plus years of spannering cars and bikes.

 

Anyway, upshot of that was the RAC bloke came out, diagnosed a dead coilpack (his diagnostics said 'coilpack failure - cylinder 4), and fitted a new one on the spot - they seem to carry them on their vans. When I got home, I replaced the other 3 with new VAG parts. All good so far.

 

 

 

So - fast forward to this morning. Driving along happily - and suddenly, drop in power, mis-fire, etc. etc. Smug me thinks 'ah, bugger - but no worries, this feels like another coilpack failure...'

 

I get home, and plug in my VCDS lite diagnostics through my Rosstech cable.

 

To my horror, I get:

 

Misfire detected - cylinder 1

Misfire detected - cylinder 2

Short to ground - injector 1

Short to ground - secondary air pump

 

   

 

Cue suicidal thoughts of horrendous electrical faults and dead components! And only last week, I had replaced the starter motor, which meant disturbing some of the wiring loom - so I was now panicking that I had damaged the loom somewhere....and I know these are new fault codes too, as I replaced an ABS sensor the other day too, and cleared the fault code for that at the same time.

 

Anyway. Once I had regained composure, I wondered if maybe it WAS just a coilpack - and as I had a spare in the garage, I thought I would give it a go as my first step in what I thought might be a long process of diagnosis. As I had two 'cylinder 1' items in the fault codes, I replaced the cylinder 1 coilpack.

 

Fired up - went for a drive - all well in my Skoda world again! 

 

Seems it WAS just a coilpack failure.

 

 

So - question is - how come my VCDS gave me all those fault codes above, and nothing about a coilpack failure??? The codes disappeared after clearing and a drive. Is it because the failed coilpack caused a load of random electrical gremlins do you think?

 

Would be interested to know.

 

And also shows, once again, that you can't necessarily rely on electronic diagnostics - and that a 'hunch' can often prove far more trustworthy!

 

Any auto electricians (or indeed anyone) care to comment please?

 

 

 

When I had a coil pack go I only had

Misfire detected cylinder 2.

Have you tried ringing skoda for a set of free coil packs under the recall.