2.0 Petrol N Reg Aspen Power Failure

[gcb]

Hi, i'm not particularly mechanically minded but I am slightly concerned as my 2.0 Aspen has for the past week decided to constantly misfire and lose power intermittently, it started last Thursday as I was driving back from work, the engine was cold and I pulled out on to the road only to find that the car kept backing of the throttle as if I was lifting my foot from the accelerator, if I pushed hard enough on the accelerator it was shoot off but not smoothly, I thought at first it was because I was running low on fuel so went to the garage and filled up and it was fine along the dual carriageway until I came off it to head towards the house and it starting mis-firing and badly behaving even to a point whereby if I didn't keep the revs up at idle it would stall, once in the driveway and revving the engine you could hear it wasn't running very well at all and not firing on all the cylinders, it was also chucking loads of black smoke out the back of the exhaust and there was a nasty smell of petrol in the air almost as if the engine was being flooded. Only other thing I have noticed about the car since i've had it only six months is that the temperature gauge doesn't move hardly an inch until it gets hot and then it will suddenly go back to zero again.

 

I took the car to my local garage as it was well overdue for a service, they carried out a complete service and replaced the plugs which hadn't been done since 40,000 and this has now done around 150,000! (platinum tipped apparently) anyway I did mention to the garage and they can't find anything wrong with it, but after getting around 25 minutes thru town to the other side it starting playing up again, badly losing power and mis-firing. It's going back to the garage tomorrow. Anything they should be paying attention to I wonder? I don't have great faith in these guys but everyone raves about them.

[frogeye]

Hi,

It sounds to me like it might be a coil pack failure, have a search of this forum for a more detailed diagnostic. Some where I have a pair of secondhand coil packs that I misguidedly changed on my Aspen (It turned out to be the MAF sensor) - if you're Huntingdon you are welcome to pick them up or PM me your address and I'll attempt to stick them in the post to you - I'm pretty sure that they are okay as the new ones made no change to the problem that my engine was having. New coil packs are about