Issue with 08 Hyundai i30 1.4L Petrol - Engine Light On, Rough Idle, Lack of Power, Car Shaking Etc

BrentMused

Hi all,

I am having a difficult time trying to get to the bottom of an issue I have recently started to experience with my car (2008 Hyundai i30 1.4L Petrol).

On my commute a couple of weeks ago, upon getting into traffic, my car started to shake and vibrate uncontrollably, the orange engine management light came on, the car was revving by itself and when I put my foot down there was very little power. It cut out a couple of times also.

I didn't want to do any damage so pulled in where safe and got the car brought to my mechanic. There was no fault code coming up for him and the engine light was gone, but he had a look at the coils and thought that perhaps was what was causing the issue. The car drove fine in various situations for a few days after I received it back from my mechanic, including a 4 hour drive with no issues at all. However, when on my holidays last week (of course!) the same thing started to happen again.

I left the car for a few hours and, given I didn't really have any other option, tried to drive it to my next destination. Luckily, I just about got there but after about an hour of driving the exact same things started to happen again. It was undriveable.

At first, it used to take a good drive before the issue would crop up, but now it's happening once the car gets at all warm.

I have the AA Rescue Plus package so was able to get towed back to my mechanic the next day and the AA guy had a look at it too. He was getting a "crankshaft position sensor" fault code on his reader. This has since been replaced back home but again the issue persists.

At this point my mechanic feels there may be a blockage somewhere causing the issue, and is going to have a look at that for me.

For clarity there is about 275,000km on the car, it is always serviced as scheduled, has been great and has rarely given me any trouble prior to this (coils were replaced about 3 years ago which rectified a similar issue but nothing aside from that).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Ideally I would like to get another year or two out of this car if at all possible.

Many thanks to you all.

sparksfly

if you have not solved this issue yet, I would have another look at the coil pack. The symptoms you describe resemble how the engine would behave with a defective coil, in your case, a coil breaking down when it gets hot.

zilog_jones

And if it's not the coil pack, what's upstream of that? ECU? Wiring?