Hello everybody out there! This is my first post so here goes:

About 2 weeks ago I was driving my 05 reg Octy 1.9Tdi Elegance (30k on clock) when it suddenly lost a lot of its pull. I was 1.5hrs into a 2hr journey and had overtaken a lorry about a mile before. Everything had felt normal but then I slowed down to take a tight left turn into a side road and as I rounded the corner and went back on the throttle there was a sudden lack of power. I found somewhere safe to stop and revved the engine in neutral, which seemed normal and there was no engine-fault indication on the dash. I thought about switching off then on but decided not to in case it wouldn’t restart. I continued home and noticed that it had lost a lot of its low revs torque and was very slow to rev above 2500rpm. On a straight or downhill stretch, with foot to the floor, it would make it to 3000rpm but no more. When accelerating I could still hear the whistle of the turbo.

The next day I took it on a dual carriageway later and found that it would get to 70mph although acceleration from 60 to 70 was pretty leisurely. Once up to 70-75mph, now on a motorway, it had no trouble maintaining its speed even up hills. Interestingly I noticed that if slowed to 50-60mph due to traffic it would pull quite strongly back up to indicated 75mph using Resume on the Cruise Control. I also tried turning the Cruise control off in case it was the cause of the problem but it didn’t make any difference.

Today I took it to my local Skoda dealer who checked it on the diagnostics and found no problem. However they did reset the "Readiness" indicators anyway. They said it was to re-synchronise the engine management sensors with each other. After this it was immediately back to normal pulling strongly and revving easily past 3500rpm. The dealer’s said they didn’t know what could have caused it – hopefully it was a one off…

I just thought I would report this in case anyone else gets the same problem.

Welcome to the forum. :wave:

Strange problem. Fingers crossed it stays away.

This very same problem happened me tonight. I have a 07 Octavia 1.9TDI with 210k kilometres on the clock. Same symptoms as OP - slow acceleration, low revs in gear, no power/torque. I pulled over and switched the car off, let it sit for a moment and then restarted the car. It now drives normal. I was terrified the turbo was knackered. But everything seems fine. Any ideas?