320ci - Lazy pull away / idle....

[nickg123]

The car is a 2001 2.2 6-cylinder with only 54k miles but it's being rather lazy and i can't work it out.

When you go to pull away it goes and then the revs almost drop slightly so unless you slip the clutch a little you get a bit of a jerky pull away - it's only minor but it's just not quite right. The same happens when changing into second and letting the clutch out again, the idle/revs seem to drop again and cause a bit of a jerky change.....

Overall the car feels pretty flat and a bit "lazy" - but it does improve as you get the revs up again.

The car went into a Garage in December to have both Cam timing sensors changed after it failed to start in the morning. The car was fine for a couple of weeks but has gone back to being like this again.

I checked into the garage and had a full diagnostic check which came back showing no faults at all so i don't believe it's another sensor failure.

Any suggestions on what it could be?

It's due an Oil Service so i'm tempted to ask BMW to investigate it but don't want to spend £££'s just trying to diagnose it.

Thanks for reading...

[kavman0]

Sounds like it the aul vanos seals problem. Do a search on google theres lots about it.

[nickg123]

Ouch that looks rather expensive if i get a garage to do it - i will print that off and show it to the garage to see what they think.

[kavman0]

Was gona get them done myself,but my indy says it's 5-6 hours work.

[nickg123]

I've just had the car serviced today and asked them to diagnose the potential problem.

They're saying it's the Mass air flow which will cost £267.27 to fix.

This sounds a bit expensive but i'm more concerned that it could be due to me dis-connecting the sensor last week? I was advise to disconnect it, go for a short drive to see if it felt better but it didn't - if anything the car was worse so i ruled that out.

Could this be why it's showing up as a fault on the diagnostics?

[TheEnd]

It depends how they diagnosed it, if they just put it on a fault code reader, it probably would pick up the fact the MAF was disconnected. I'm not sure of the exact "rules" for a MAF, some problems need to be seen on 2 consecutive drive cycles, some need to be there for longer than a certain time, so it's not guaranteed that disconnecting would have triggered it, but it still is a possibility.

If they logged the data, they you would be able to see immediately if it was giving poor readings.

The price is to be expected, they aren't hard to change, probably about 10 minutes, but the sensor itself costs a bit. A definite candidate for DIY repairs, but you'd still want to know for sure before you go ahead.