Here we go - Hesitation issues

[lil_coz]

The latest member of the tuned S3 club to have hesitation issues.

I don't know if my problem is the same as others, but I'll go over my symptoms.

It hesitates under load and at the points of hesitation, the engine light flickers. The car is an S-tronic, and it makes the same popping sound that it makes when it changes gear when it hesitates. So it pops and farts basically. I've also noticed that when it first hesitates, if you keep giving it some, it slowly goes away and goes back to normal.

Is this the same things that others are noticing? Also the car has done 2k miles and it's been 500 miles since the map.

Cheers.

 

[S3Alex]

The latest member of the tuned S3 club to have hesitation issues.I don't know if my problem is the same as others, but I'll go over my symptoms.It hesitates under load and at the points of hesitation, the engine light flickers. The car is an S-tronic, and it makes the same popping sound that it makes when it changes gear when it hesitates. So it pops and farts basically. I've also noticed that when it first hesitates, if you keep giving it some, it slowly goes away and goes back to normal.Is this the same things that others are noticing? Also the car has done 2k miles and it's been 500 miles since the map.Cheers.

The usual culprits are plugs and coilpacks,in that order.....plugs I find last about 5000 miles at best with the car remapped.

 

[lil_coz]

It can't be the plugs with only 2k miles on the clock can it? Unless they were duff to begin with and the map pushed them over the edge over the last 500 miles? Would the remap affect the coil packs at all or is that a common problem even with standard S3's?

I'll be ringing Kim over at MTM tomorrow and see what he says.

 

[Gavin0478]

fuel pump seems to be the weak point...
shame you cant get a live afr readout via the obd port

 

[Silky-S3]

Thats sounds like more than the usual hesitation that people sometime gets, normally its very slight with no engine light.

 

[lil_coz]

shame you cant get a live afr readout via the obd port

That my friend is a just a random collection of letters to me. lol

Thats sounds like more than the usual hesitation that people sometime gets, normally its very slight with no engine light.

Yea my engine light definately flickers when it starts to hesitate. When it stops, the light goes off. Surely this would log a fault then and would be easier to diagnose once it's plugged in?

I wouldn't say the hesitation is savage, but it is definitely noticible. I wouldn't quite class it as very slight either...

 

[Gavin0478]

lol sorry.
afr is air fuel ratio and is a good way to check if running rich or lean throught the rev range and is a good way to check fuel system is coping.
basically you can read real time or log and print out a graph with nice fancy equipment that is quite common at engine mapping/rolling road sites.

the obd is the diagnostic socket which you plug your fault code reader into...
out of interest have they disconnected the ecu to remap as i would say normally the engine man light comes on and stays on till next time car is turned off and on more than flicking...
reason im asking is have they connected it back all tight and are the earths tight as could be a case of a bad connection thats fine till under full load.

 

[lil_coz]

Thanks for that Gavin! Making sense now.

They didn't disconnect the ECU. Plug in jobby. It doesn't happen all the time, that's the thing. Ah well, I'll ring Kim in the morning then onto Audi and see what they say.

 

[IceHanger]

it's not the ESP light is it mate? that flickers on mine under acceleration

Looking at doing mine in the near future so reading this with interest.

 

[Rob W8]

Any news?

 

[oldlaw]

2 weeks ago car started to misfire under heavy accleration. Had it taken to audi garage after the RAC guy said it was misfiring on cylinders 3 and 4. Got the car back 3 days later. Was told that they had replaced coilpack & spark plugs on 3 and 4 cylinder. Picked up car and driving home the same again. Car back to garage where after another few days phoned them and they told me they had replaced all the spark plugs after consulting with audi homebase. Car now feels ok but the mpg has gone down by a good 5/6 mpg. Any thoughts?

 

[IceHanger]

Not good!!
Would suggest checking or getting checked the plug gaps..old school i know but if your getting a crap burn it may be down to that.

 

[warren_S5]

This is unbelievable, what the hell is happening with these later model S3's. It's almost like they've been built to fail with any mods. Why when the early cars seem ok is a mystery, I wonder what has changed?

Best of buck getting some resolution on this; keep us posted.

 

[RedDejavu]

ok now I am really concerned to do anything to my car:/. Good luck buddy with your issue hope this will get sorted soon.

 

[warren_S5]

I can't make up my mind whats at the rott cause of all this.

It seems predominantly to be happening to later cars, and more acutely to ones that are remapped, irrespective of mapping agent, mileage or number of attempted fixes.

Whenever I got misfiring on my '07 I would usually end up taking plugs out first and checking them. With Stg 1 they tended to be carbon foulled if I'd been doing a lot of short journeys around the tip, and these lean burn engines seem to suffer short journeys more than their old school predecessors. Whether the thicker ceramic collars on the cooler plugs means plugs don't make it up to temp for a good while longer meaning you get excessive deposit build up on plugs (unburned fuel) which then goes on to affect the sparking capability of the plug????

It might be worth in mapped cars dropping the plug gap from 0.8mm to 0.7mm to see if this helps, particularly in the colder weather, but other than that it's back to head scratching.

One wonders if they'd taken the unenvironmentally friendly step of adding a fifth cold start injector if this problem may not exist, but then there are all sorts of issues with plugs, coil packs, HPFP and I think the ait intake set up is seriously compromised, so where do you start to investigate?

All I know is once I went Stg 2+ I never suffered again, but that required a change of exhaust system...... Not the answer for everyone, but the CAI and TBE seem critical pieces of the jigsaw when remediating some of these running issues.

 

[lil_coz]

it's not the ESP light is it mate? that flickers on mine under acceleration

Looking at doing mine in the near future so reading this with interest.

Lol! So many people asked that question! Lol I'll tell you what... if the TC felt the need to come into play in 3rd and 4th gear then it wasn't just a stage 1 map, but the Lambo V10 shoehorned in! Lol

Defo engine management light. It stayed on for a couple of seconds after the hesitations stopped.

2 weeks ago car started to misfire under heavy accleration. Had it taken to audi garage after the RAC guy said it was misfiring on cylinders 3 and 4. Got the car back 3 days later. Was told that they had replaced coilpack & spark plugs on 3 and 4 cylinder. Picked up car and driving home the same again. Car back to garage where after another few days phoned them and they told me they had replaced all the spark plugs after consulting with audi homebase. Car now feels ok but the mpg has gone down by a good 5/6 mpg. Any thoughts?

Interesting. That goes with the usual coilpacks and plugs theory. Is your car mapped or standard?

I can't make up my mind whats at the rott cause of all this.

It seems predominantly to be happening to later cars, and more acutely to ones that are remapped, irrespective of mapping agent, mileage or number of attempted fixes.

Whenever I got misfiring on my '07 I would usually end up taking plugs out first and checking them. With Stg 1 they tended to be carbon foulled if I'd been doing a lot of short journeys around the tip, and these lean burn engines seem to suffer short journeys more than their old school predecessors. Whether the thicker ceramic collars on the cooler plugs means plugs don't make it up to temp for a good while longer meaning you get excessive deposit build up on plugs (unburned fuel) which then goes on to affect the sparking capability of the plug????

It might be worth in mapped cars dropping the plug gap from 0.8mm to 0.7mm to see if this helps, particularly in the colder weather, but other than that it's back to head scratching.

One wonders if they'd taken the unenvironmentally friendly step of adding a fifth cold start injector if this problem may not exist, but then there are all sorts of issues with plugs, coil packs, HPFP and I think the ait intake set up is seriously compromised, so where do you start to investigate?

All I know is once I went Stg 2+ I never suffered again, but that required a change of exhaust system...... Not the answer for everyone, but the CAI and TBE seem critical pieces of the jigsaw when remediating some of these running issues.

Warren, like you say so many issues cropping up with the newer S3's when mapped! You could turn the older ones into beasts! Interesting post above. The original plan was keeping it stage 1, the last thing I need is an excuse to go stage 2+! When you start tuning, are you doing it all in one go? Or start with stage 1 for a while?

I spoke with Kim yesterday, and he was quite happy looking at the car. But he's a bit far for me so we said the best plan is to take it into Audi for them to check it over because there's a couple of other issues that they can look at too. If they can't sort it out, then I'll have to go over to Kim and see what he can find. It's booked into them on Wed so we'll see. The car was fine all day yesterday. Pulled as cleanly as ever. We'll see today if it behaves.

The other problems that have come up is with the passenger side window. When you put it down, then make it go back up again, it goes half way up and then comes down a bit on its own. The other is with the side mirrors. When they are folded in and you go to fold them out again, sometimes it's only the one that folds out. But when you fold it back in again, and then back out, they both work fine. All intermittent problems! Oh the joys lol.

 

[paddy]

My regret was throwing my old plugs away. Having diagnosed two of the four as failed with a leak to earth of about 400M ohms i am sure we could have got an answer to these problems had i passed them to Warren and on to NGK for diagnosis of where exactly the leak to earth was. Poss a break down in insulation due to carbon build up but also a failure of the ceramic insulator or even a plug running very wet and resulting in a tracking line of carbon across the insulator. I really dont think its coincidence that i had two plugs fail and the leakage to earth was identical on both. I dont think the map is the problem at all, rather the inability of the plugs to cope with running outside of the std map maybe due to a cheapening of components or a different way of construction (of the plugs)l. I also note that when i spoke to the NGK rep he said that NGK had developed the PFR7S8EG plugs specifically for the S3 and did not recommend iridiums . My feelings were they knew all about this problem and had already tackled it. My PFR's are running better now than the Bosch ever did from new.
The only complaint i would have re: revo map is the stock settings as installed are very conservative and with a SPS switch you can get the car to run a lot better. Better throttle response, less lag and smoother running.

 

[paddy]

strange........font seems to have changed on that post !!

 

[Kelza]

Paddy whats gets me mate 700 for a map plus all the cost in parts to get to stage 2 + and my car feels totally standard its driving me nuts...

 

[Gavin0478]

are tts and golf/roc/leon owners having similar issues?

 

[paddy]

Paddy whats gets me mate 700 for a map plus all the cost in parts to get to stage 2 + and my car feels totally standard its driving me nuts...

that makes no sense at all, i just have stage 1 and its constantly fighting the ESP to stop wheel spin in 1st 2nd 3rd. In a straight drag the other day i was hanging on the coat tails of a new M3 up to 100mph and then i gave up as i like my licence -) Cant ask much more of a little hatch back

I would love to see your revo setting via a SPS switch, sounds like its been left on stock by mistake.

 

[lil_coz]

I know that these are intermittent problems, but how intermittent was it for you guys? It's been 3 days now and the car hasn't put a foot wrong at all!

Still looking at changing the plugs. Guessing you guys do this yourselves? Where can I get them from? Also, what happens when it comes to having the car serviced? Will they change the plugs again to Bosch ones? Will they notice that I've changed the plugs and realise that's its possibly been mapped? How are you guys playing it?

 

[warren_S5]

Don't think Audi pull the plugs in our cars for 60k unless the car is suffering big issues so you should be OK.

If I was you I'd get some of Paddys plugs and try gapping them at 0.7mm

 

[lil_coz]

So Audi don't change the plugs till you hit 60k miles?! They last that long as standard?

 

[RPB]

Generic maps, pish! LOL. Nothing like the road tuning of a bespoke map when the car is mapped to its OWN setup This is one thing I love about the EcuTek maps. Bring it on for Audi's I say!

 

[ramos333]

I've had all the same issues. Car was mapped with Revo first, then with MTM. Put the car back to stock and issues were still there. after rejecting the car with 10k on the clock I now await a brand new S3 at no charge or change in terms and conditions . I'm not touching the new one.

 

[lil_coz]

You actually rejected the car Ramos?! What did Audi say? Were your issues constant? Because mine hasn't done it for 3 days now.

 

[Cheese]

All I know is once I went Stg 2+ I never suffered again, but that required a change of exhaust system...... Not the answer for everyone, but the CAI and TBE seem critical pieces of the jigsaw when remediating some of these running issues.

I have a TBE already but not CAI. They seem to make the most horrid sound from the YouTube videos I have seen...

I really dont think its coincidence that i had two plugs fail and the leakage to earth was identical on both. I dont think the map is the problem at all, rather the inability of the plugs to cope with running outside of the std map maybe due to a cheapening of components or a different way of construction (of the plugs)l. I also note that when i spoke to the NGK rep he said that NGK had developed the PFR7S8EG plugs specifically for the S3 and did not recommend iridiums.

I had the OEM plugs changed at ~16,000 miles and am now seeing similar symptoms again after another ~2,000 miles running on PFR7S8EG plugs.

...that makes no sense at all, i just have stage 1 and its constantly fighting the ESP to stop wheel spin in 1st 2nd 3rd.

Really? Or was it wet and bendy? You sure your tyre pressures are OK - I started getting wheelspin after the first set of plugs were replaced in 4th and was pretty shocked, thinking wow, that reallly fixed it. Car felt uncontrollably fast and it turned out that I had a nail in one of the rear tyres and it was about 15psi!

I know that these are intermittent problems, but how intermittent was it for you guys? It's been 3 days now and the car hasn't put a foot wrong at all!

Mine was difficult to replicate but it gradually got worse over about a month and AmD were finally able to replicate it. If the engine management light came on I am guessing something must have been logged.

 

[warren_S5]

Mine was difficult to replicate but it gradually got worse over about a month and AmD were finally able to replicate it. If the engine management light came on I am guessing something must have been logged.

And when AmD replicated the fault they found the issue causing it was ________________ ????

I have a TBE already but not CAI. They seem to make the most horrid sound from the YouTube videos I have seen...

They're not everyone's cup of tea, granted. However if I had to choose between a £30k car which suffers continual ongoing misfire issues and a CAI.... If you wrap of coat the CAI pipework they do quieten down a bit, but not much.

 

[ramos333]

You actually rejected the car Ramos?! What did Audi say? Were your issues constant? Because mine hasn't done it for 3 days now.

My first s3 had a mecatronic failure after 250 miles, and my current S3 has had hesitation issues since July and my dealer even had the car for 9 days and replaced manifold and knock sensors and car was still the same. In the end I'd had enough! I've had an Rs4, TT and now S3 from my dealer and have great relationship with them. You have to remember that they sell a product on behalf of Audi UK so they will fight your corner as any costs will be incurred by Audi UK and not the dealer. I will now be picking up a brand new Ibis white (currently have phantom black) S3 sport back black edition with panoramic roof and parking sensors which I haven't got at the moment, plus a car with 0 miles and no change in my current contract and terms so I can't lose! Might look at the new RS4 next year

 

[RedDejavu]

Are here any users with new 10 onwards S3s running Revo MTM or AMD with no issuse? Just wonder if there are any.

 

[Cheese]

And when AmD replicated the fault they found the issue causing it was ________________ ????

Plugs but then the issue just came back after 2,000 mile son those plugs. I implied it further up the thread and assumed you would join the dots. My bad.

They're not everyone's cup of tea, granted. However if I had to choose between a £30k car which suffers continual ongoing misfire issues and a CAI.... If you wrap of coat the CAI pipework they do quieten down a bit, but not much.

So would I - but that is another few hundred quid being thrown at the problem and it may not improve things.

 

[paddy]

No nails in the tires cheese Just a lot of time playing around with the SPS switch to get the software spot on. I would guess there is 10-15 bhp extra to be had over the std revo stg 1 map if you spend a little time fine tuning. Get the advance curve right and throttle response is way better and thats what i am feeling with the ESP I think.

 

[paddy]

A thought on CAI...
At most speeds the std air intake flows plenty of air. It is taken from the grill and will be mostly cold air. The problem with the std system is the internal shape and bend of the induction pipe which can cause uneven air flow. I have seen a report where the guy put pressure sensors at intervals down the pipe and at one point just past the 90 degree bend he was getting negative pressure ie a vacuum which is the opposite of what you want. this is caused by swirling air from a bend or obstacle in the tract, just a ridge in the plastic fitting would do it. The std paper filter was found to flow more than enough air for the engine. Even pipercross do not claim 1bhp extra from a panel filter....
Given that the noise problem with CAI is all down to the filters and the filters are really not as good as the std paper filters it seems to me you need the CAI ducting and larger bore with the std airbox. Of coarse CAI producers dont want to sell you a length of plastic pipe for £5 so they add Carbon fibre filter housings because people want the aesthetics but non of that makes your car go faster in fact unless the car it fine tuned to the individual add ons it will probably go slower. ( just sound faster)
I spent years tuning M/C engines and i can assure you the fuel/air intake is megga important. Get that right and you start to see why a Morris 1000 did 0-60 eventually and 30 mpg and Nissan 1000 micra does 0-60 in half the time and does 60mpg.
Remember the reason people put video's of CAI systems on you tube is because of the noise not air flow.

 

[warren_S5]

Plugs but then the issue just came back after 2,000 mile son those plugs. I implied it further up the thread and assumed you would join the dots. My bad.

Whilst changing the plugs temporarily rectifies the issue as many of us have experienced, I thought there was more to come in your explanation. Changing plugs is trial and error, and as far as I'm concerned the plugs are a the benefactor of something (either air / fuel / mixture / timing or gap related) that are suffering as result of these things happening.

Finding the issue as opposed to providing a 2,000 mile temporary fix are different things in my book, but then I can't join the dots, so I'll revert back to mouth breathing and watching X-Factor?!

 

[box500]

Paddy whats gets me mate 700 for a map plus all the cost in parts to get to stage 2 + and my car feels totally standard its driving me nuts...

Funny that! My Revo stage 1 S3 2007 (just under 290BHP) feels dog slow and struggles to pull away from other performance cars that you'd think it would beast. After having a 306BHP Merc CLK 500 I don't think it is a weight issue. My old 300BHP impreza was leagues faster (but a bit lighter)

I have nothing like the hesitation/misfires that some have, but there is a big flat spot in the rolling road graph which needs to be sorted.

 

[oldlaw]

Plugs replaced by audi.now mpg is down by 5/6mpg according to the dis. Power seems much the same but throttle response is different. Don`t know if it is better or worse just feels different.

 

[paddy]

Box
"Feeling" power is down to Torque not bhp but even so a std S3 should see of a SL500 and a stg1 should be 1.5-2 seconds quicker to 60mph.
Have i got the only quick S3 ??

 

[S3Alex]

I've been pretty fortunate with mine overall,and had the usual plug thing,which is easily solved,but back at Stg2+ there was a persistent mid-high rpm misfire for a while.
After a lot of logging and fiddling around,it was tracked down to my attempts at keeping the engine bay looking stock,by keeping the standard induction system,and at that sort of power level it was simply strangling the airflow,and making the ECU back off,as well as causing a misfire......once the intake was changed for a decent system(first a Forge,and now the ITG),it's never looked back.

 

[S3Alex]

Have i got the only quick S3 ??

No!....