m325i 709 Report post Posted September 7, 2011 I'm driving a 318i at the moment and intermittently I loose engine power. Revs drop and accelerator does nothing. The engine is still running though, at idle speed. If I turn off the ignition and restart with a bit of a rev it seems to come back to life OK. It only happens once every few weeks, at any engine speed. It was taken to a generic mechanic ages ago but they couldn't see anything wrong. Any ideas? Dirty injectors? Coil leads? Fuel pump? Seems to happen more when tank is lowish on gas, but not always. Pic relevant. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
barf 0 Report post Posted September 8, 2011 hello! i bought a mint E30 once with identical symptoms and some poor woman had been ripped off by half a dozen mechanics looking at it, who still hadn't fixed the problem. in my case it turned out the ECU was poorly manufactured. a piece of foam installed during assembly had warped the PCB (similar to the XBox 360 RROD fault) and was causing solder joins to degrade, especially the higher current ones. simply reflowing the bad joins fixed the problem for me. I've opened up the facelift ECU's and they seem to have identified and fixed this problem by then so i'm not sure if it'll apply to you. check simple things first always tho, i discovered this by enforcing a separation conflict between fist and ECU :-) Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
m325i 709 Report post Posted September 8, 2011 Thanks for that. Problem is this is just a' temporary' car that's probably worth $1500, so spending money trying to fix an annoyance issue doesn't seem worth it, as it has never left me stranded or anything and happens once a fortnight maybe. I'll look out for a cheap ECU on trademe maybe. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites