I recently purchased a 90 Jetta (1.8, manual). After a few days on the road, it did just what the previous owner said it would do, and began to studder. Now, I've researched about the ecu's and what not, but he told me that he had the dealership replace it (?, dunno..).
The problem is as stands: The car suddenly acts if it is running on two cyl'rs, and losses a load of power, dark smoke boils out of the exahaust. It immediatly stops when I turn the key off, and then on (quickly).. runs fine, for a few seconds- then, problem again. It's got to be an electrical thing, it happens too sudden to be some sort of vaccum.
The problem exsists whether the car is warm or cold. Sometimes it acts up, and sometimes it doesn't..But, it is getting increasingly worse.
Now, since I'm sure someone else here has had this problem, I'd like a few peices of insight, if ya could-

Many thanks,
-t

 

Wow, what a response I recieved from the forum board portion of the site! I'd come to assume that : A. Noone on the forum board knew. B. Noone on the board cared.C. The board does this "no response" thing for a few weeks to get the user to do his own research (or take the car to a shop and learn nothing, but, how to loose alot of money in two days) or D. The post was written in Japanese.

I'm assuming it was D.
I did take C. as the first choice, over a few days, and went out to dig up my own research. I found that, quite typically speaking, those years Jetta's have sensors that go bad, interrupting the data flow to the ecu (by creating bad signals to thus therof). Upon a short trip to the local imports dealer and repair guy, he stated that in fact, the Oxygen sensor had gone bad, causing the ecu to disrupt.
Upon unplugging the item, the car ran a good bit to the rich side, but, did eliminate the studdering.


There ya go!


-tom

 

Tom,

On occasions some posts get overlooked. This forum is not extremely busy nor does it have countless members that would most likely have the answer. Being bitter about it does not help (ie insulting the integrity of the forum and it's members). As well, try not to use profanity or if so needed, censor it at your discretion.

If in the future you do not receive a response, please feel free to make additional posts within moderation to raise attention to the thread.

In addition I'm glad you found the solution to your problem. I've had the same issue but it was not a faulty O2 Sensor. It seemed to have corrected itself on it's own. Possibly after cleaning dirty contacts for one of my sensor plugs.

-Jeff