Hello everyone, I have a problem that is not perhaps common but certainly happens to various Audi / VAG owners.
A red blinking oil can comes on, blinks 3 times with a terrifying and loud noise and says:
OIL PRESSURE IS TOO LOW! SWITCH OFF ENGINE!
Initially, this was very scary, but now, a year later and many tries & fails at fixing the problem later I don't care about it in the same scope as I did when it first happened, but of course I am still trying to fix it.
I've scoured online and this forum for answers, but all the threads I have found I already did the things suggested, plus the situation presented by the original poster was different from mine everytime.
The car in question is a 1.6TDI, coming up on 150k miles done. Ever since it started about a year ago the problem manifest only when the car is decelerating to low speeds from motorway driving, usually happening when I am going down the off-ramp.
It does happen at other times when the car is going through some elevations or hard turns but not nearly as much. I also had it happen once on a drive (and in that situation consistently) when I was more or less choking the engine on the 7th gear while only doing 30mph or so. Everytime I would put it down to 6th the warning would disappear, and everytime I put it back up to 7 it would re-appear.
Now when I try that it doesn't happen, so it was a weird one off.
For the past year what has consistently worked to get this error off without switching the engine off was to just knock down a gear and give it some thrust / pressure, even momentary one would cause the error to go away.
I've been driving the car pretty consistently for the past year up until Corona appeared with the error only being gone for a month & a half / two months in that period when I tried one of my fixes (details on that in the chronological list below). And the engine hasn't exploded yet, so I presume its not something super critical, but definitely something that could be doing slow damage over time. I haven't noticed any power drops, the car is still spry.
So, what have I tried so far? Here comes the list. In more or less chronological order. As a note, my oil was never too low, the car never lost oil randomly and never gained any through other liquids.
- Checked with VCDS and found no apparent errors reported by the on-board computer.
- Sent it to a Garage to have the oil pan taken off, cleaned along with the oil pickup end, and new oil. Garage promptly ignored me, did an engine flush and just changed the oil & filter. The problem persisted more or less immediately.
- Did the repair myself, took the oil pan off, cleaned it, cleaned the oil pickup end mesh bit, in the oil pan and on the oil pickup I found bits of plastic, one being quite a large piece. This was after I had an encounter with a BMW that damaged the front end, so I suspect it was from this.
After doing this, the problem disappeared for about month & a half - 2 months. Then it re-appeared
- Changed the fuel filter
- Took the oil pan off again, cleaned the oil pickup end again, this time they were both clean, no metal filing or anything. At this point the issue was here for the past 8 months or so.
- Swapped the oil sensor that is embedded in the oil pan. After this the problem seemingly got worse as the error appeared more frequently, but now after a week it has gone back to normal levels.
The only things I can think of that I could do are as follows:
- Apparantely there is another oil sensor on the engine block, but I can't really find any information or parts about it.
- Maybe the actual pickup pipe is somewhat blocked and not just the end of it. If you are thinking that it might be those plastic bits that I found during my first clean of the pan then think again, before I had that crash the error was there for a good 4 month period.
- Maybe the oil pump is failing, but then again why would it mainly fail when I am coming off high speeds from the motorway, looking at an oil pump design maybe its the Stepless Vane Rotor inside of it that is loose.
Ideally if any of you can share any tid bits of knowledge I might be missing before I go and drop £120 on a new oil pump that would be appreciated. Thank you.
A red blinking oil can comes on, blinks 3 times with a terrifying and loud noise and says:
OIL PRESSURE IS TOO LOW! SWITCH OFF ENGINE!
Initially, this was very scary, but now, a year later and many tries & fails at fixing the problem later I don't care about it in the same scope as I did when it first happened, but of course I am still trying to fix it.
I've scoured online and this forum for answers, but all the threads I have found I already did the things suggested, plus the situation presented by the original poster was different from mine everytime.
The car in question is a 1.6TDI, coming up on 150k miles done. Ever since it started about a year ago the problem manifest only when the car is decelerating to low speeds from motorway driving, usually happening when I am going down the off-ramp.
It does happen at other times when the car is going through some elevations or hard turns but not nearly as much. I also had it happen once on a drive (and in that situation consistently) when I was more or less choking the engine on the 7th gear while only doing 30mph or so. Everytime I would put it down to 6th the warning would disappear, and everytime I put it back up to 7 it would re-appear.
Now when I try that it doesn't happen, so it was a weird one off.
For the past year what has consistently worked to get this error off without switching the engine off was to just knock down a gear and give it some thrust / pressure, even momentary one would cause the error to go away.
I've been driving the car pretty consistently for the past year up until Corona appeared with the error only being gone for a month & a half / two months in that period when I tried one of my fixes (details on that in the chronological list below). And the engine hasn't exploded yet, so I presume its not something super critical, but definitely something that could be doing slow damage over time. I haven't noticed any power drops, the car is still spry.
So, what have I tried so far? Here comes the list. In more or less chronological order. As a note, my oil was never too low, the car never lost oil randomly and never gained any through other liquids.
- Checked with VCDS and found no apparent errors reported by the on-board computer.
- Sent it to a Garage to have the oil pan taken off, cleaned along with the oil pickup end, and new oil. Garage promptly ignored me, did an engine flush and just changed the oil & filter. The problem persisted more or less immediately.
- Did the repair myself, took the oil pan off, cleaned it, cleaned the oil pickup end mesh bit, in the oil pan and on the oil pickup I found bits of plastic, one being quite a large piece. This was after I had an encounter with a BMW that damaged the front end, so I suspect it was from this.
After doing this, the problem disappeared for about month & a half - 2 months. Then it re-appeared
- Changed the fuel filter
- Took the oil pan off again, cleaned the oil pickup end again, this time they were both clean, no metal filing or anything. At this point the issue was here for the past 8 months or so.
- Swapped the oil sensor that is embedded in the oil pan. After this the problem seemingly got worse as the error appeared more frequently, but now after a week it has gone back to normal levels.
The only things I can think of that I could do are as follows:
- Apparantely there is another oil sensor on the engine block, but I can't really find any information or parts about it.
- Maybe the actual pickup pipe is somewhat blocked and not just the end of it. If you are thinking that it might be those plastic bits that I found during my first clean of the pan then think again, before I had that crash the error was there for a good 4 month period.
- Maybe the oil pump is failing, but then again why would it mainly fail when I am coming off high speeds from the motorway, looking at an oil pump design maybe its the Stepless Vane Rotor inside of it that is loose.
Ideally if any of you can share any tid bits of knowledge I might be missing before I go and drop £120 on a new oil pump that would be appreciated. Thank you.
