dr_mat

I wouldn't have thought running rich would cause a misfire. Usually running rich makes the car ultra smooth ... But yes, go for a blast, do the ecu reset, remember also that half an hour charge is unlikely to really help a completely flat battery so you need to get out there and drive for a good hour or two, or leave it charging overnight. If it's still iffy after that, scan the ECU.

Sounds more like the bottom ball joint is knackered to me..

I think it's about shortness of journeys and low speed commuting myself. I saw 36 mpg on my VR at the end of a 200 mile journey at an average speed of 50mph, but that was over such a long period of time that the cold-start enrichment at the start of the journey had dropped off the rolling average in the MFA.. Meanwhile, about town, doing short journeys, it's not uncommon for my VR to average 18 mpg.. and that gets worse in the winter. I can see as low as 11 or 12 mpg when it's really cold ...

Then I heard wrong.. :) What's the alternative? If I knew that I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you about it! ;) True: there's another pigopoly that the world should never have allowed to happen. They're sitting there shafting everyone and there's literally nothing we can do to stop it. Ignoring for the minute that arguments about oil dependency, OPEC have the power to reduce the price by increasing production. They choose not to, and frankly the rest of the world should be doing something about that. The narrow power band is not a problem in terms of propelling a vehicle, only in terms of "having fun". As you've said, this is all about boys and toys, and little or nothing about the use of suitable technology. Sure in lean burn mode the FSi is pretty efficient, but they're also crap to drive (lurching in and out of lean burn mode) and when you open the throttle it's still 1:14.7 .. But that's not the point: the point is you (being a petrol head) wouldn't buy one, so that puts it in the same camp as the diesel.. ;) And "hardly any thirstier"? Is that like "hardly any more poisonous? :) I know plenty of people who get 50-60 mpg out of their TDis and no-one who gets more than 40mpg out of any reasonably similar spec petrol engine. Take both cars into town and the difference is more stark: diesels use so much less fuel idling than petrol engines that the difference they make in traffic is much bigger. It's also made from food! This is the big problem with "renewable" fuels. Everyone needs to eat, no-one needs to drive, so the logical choice is surely to burn things we can't eat .. So E85 and friends are pushing up the price of food. Which is fine for us rich countries, but the poor countries just get more shafted and have to support our right to be bloody stupid. Anyway, I know that in reality you're right: nothing much will really change until we *actually* run out of oil; but I'd like to hope that we will collectively plan far enough ahead to make it a less painful switchover when the inevitable does happen and we find some alternatives before it's too late.

Look around mate! You don't see many high performance petrol cars that don't have turbos! A few: it's mostly Honda VTECs which get roundly criticised for having no torque, or it's large V6/V8 engines with truly epic fuel consumption. And a 180bhp turbo diesel produces 50% more torque and uses 50% less fuel than a turbo petrol engine that's putting out the same amount of power.. Of course it's true to say that a non-turbo diesel versus a non-turbo petrol engine is not really a contest, but the diesel will use a tiny fraction of the fuel of the petrol engine, and it will do 90% of the same job, it just won't produce anything like the *power*. Torque outputs will be similar though.

It's normal to smell like it's running rich at cold start, but it shouldn't smell like that once it's warm. Most likely culprit is the lambda.

Can you get some pictures? Might be worth double checking everything that's been off at some point .. and also make sure it's not just that the tyre was damaged at some other time, perhaps while it wasn't even on the car.

Actually IIUC the only aspect of the VR6 that was designed with this in mind was the use of timing *chains* rather than a rubber belt. Everything else on the AAA/ABV blocks was clearly designed for petrol. There *is* a vr- diesel in the VW range, but it only went into the pointless cars - the tiguans and the tosspots and the vans. And it has to be said, although I'm sure diesels WILL all but eradicate the petrol engine in our lifetime for the majority of drivers, they are far from paragons of virtue. They are still pretty shoddy in terms of the smoke they put out. Like I've said many times before the petrol fuelled reciprocating piston engine is a design long overdue a complete rethink. The restriction of having to run at or near stoichiometric fuel/air ratio all the time ultimately prevents you getting much better economy than we are currently getting out of it. Get rid of the reciprocating pistons and you'll release MORE of the energy you burn, rather than using it to throw lumps of metal about, but you're still stuck with ~1:20 fuel to air.

Vince (or someone there) is usually able to drop you at Leomington Spa station anyway, if you drop the car off early enough. I often leave my car up there for a couple of days or so, but I guess it's easy for me - Leomington Spa is on the mainline to Reading, so it's less than an hour on the train home..

Cor, imagine if someone had collected lots of Corrado-related facts together and made them available by some web site voodoo! That would be really handy! I guess it would look a bit like this: http://the-corrado.net/wiki/index.php/C ... rrado_Info ;) :) Funnily enough, people don't buy Corrado's for their excellent fuel economy!

Yep. http://the-corrado.net/wiki/index.php/Corrado_recalls

You're lucky that your commute doesn't involve sitting still most of the time. If I actually bothered to use the VR every day, that's what it would be doing: 1st and 2nd gear, brake pedal, the clutch would die in six months.. I think that if your drive to work wasn't quite so "enjoyable" maybe you'd think differently about the concept..! Me? I just walk instead a lot of the time... I don't really need a "first" car let alone a second...

.. OR save yourself a stack of cash and a stack of time, leave the car to rot then get it machine polished every five years... ;) LOL

Hmm. - give way to the right, unless - someone is already on the junction .. in which case it's bleeding obvious that you shouldn't drive into them! She drove off without stopping to exchange details after an accident. Regardless of the argument over why THIS should be an offence when stopping to report any other type of crime isn't, it IS an offence and she's dead in the water.

They are the same, yes.

What the hell happened to the heat shield behind the engine block?! It looks like the local Uri Geller convention visited town.

Did you check the engine for error codes?

It depends how many windings there are on your alternator, and apparently: "To provide direct current with low ripple, automotive alternators have a three-phase winding." Three phase winding means you need six diodes.

"AH" = "Amp Hour". Which means the battery will deliver the EQUIVALENT of 74 AMPS for one HOUR before going flat. (or 37 Amps for two hours, or 18.5 amp for four hours .. or .. you get it .. ) What difference does it make? Pretty much none whatsoever, normally. But when the battery starts to get drained, the larger capacity battery will sustain it for longer before going flat.

70 mA will drain a *fully charged* 74Ah battery in 44 (forty four) days.. So either your battery is nowhere near fully charged (voltage at the battery terminals would be 12.6V if it's fully charged), or you have far more drain than 0.07 Amps... (Or your battery is fooked!) OR you're misreading your multimeter! 0.7 amp drain (700mA) will drain the same battery from fully charged in four days... ;)

Yep, the voltage drop is made worse when the bulbs are there: cos the current will heat the wires up and increase their resistance.

Yes I think so. You may even have something going pretty much to short out, to pull the alternator's output down that much. As for what, well that's rather more difficult to locate. Likely suspects are anything you've had fiddled with since the problem started occurring.. Alarms? ICE? Lights been disconnected/reconnected? At the most, you might have a voltage regulator problem on the alternator. But if the windings had actually failed it wouldn't put out any volts at all..

I already said I didn't think it was your alternator...

I would say that's correct behaviour .. but I don't remember testing it..

Correct. Alternator output should be 13.8 to 14.3 volts. But that doesn't mean the alternator is faulty, just that the output, by the time it gets to the battery, is only 13v. It may well be that there is a current drain resulting in the alternator being unable to maintain 13.8 v output. And note that it would only take a 30W drain to flatten your car battery from fully charged to zero in twenty four hours by the way.. 30W is about the same as running the sidelights .... And btw, your car battery doesn't really put out 12.99 volts. Leave it for thirty minutes or so after taking it off charge and you'll see that it *really* puts out 12.6V. (Assuming your meter is properly calibrated ...)