Zafira Z18XE Auto. Throttle dies. Advice sought.

Zafira Z18XE Auto. Throttle dies. Advice sought.

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Big Rod

Original Poster:

6,199 posts

216 months

Friday 27th October 2017
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Hi all,

I bought a cheap <flame suit on> Zafira a coupl'a months ago for my Mum to replace her aging Sharan.

It's quite a tidy little thing and has about 108k on it but I bought it with a running issue.

Before I bought it, the previous owners had the coil pack replaced but didn't want to spend any more money on it so passed it on to me.

Since I bought it, I've replaced the...

MAF sensor, (originally a pattern one but now has a genuine Vx one.)
Primary Lambda sensor.
Plugs
Throttle pedal.

...I've cleaned the throttle body and opened out all the clogged vents/holes so it's shining like a new pin.

All of these things made it go just a little bit better and now, 99% of the time, it runs like a sewing machine. I actually quite like it.

However despite all this, it drops power intermittently.

You can drive along and not change a thing and the engine just loses power. No rhyme or reason. If I take my foot off the throttle and put it back on and it drives away just fine.

There are no fault codes and no EML light.

I've had two techies drive it while hooked up to diag's and it seems the injector duration is going into idle but everything else checks out OK.

To top it all, today I've had a 'known to be good' ECU, Lambda and MAF fitted but it made no difference.

We even disabled the traction control on it to see if that was kicking in for some unknown reason but still the issue persists.

It's really got us scratching our heads so thought I'd reach out and see if anyone else has come across this or something like it.

Any ideas?

TIA.

M32Guy

62 posts

89 months

Thursday 2nd November 2017
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What year and engine is this Zafira? What are you using to read the fault codes?

Big Rod

Original Poster:

6,199 posts

216 months

Friday 3rd November 2017
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It's an '04 plate Z18XE, (per the title)

The codes have been read by a variety of devices, from my Mickey Mouse reader up to specialist Delphi equipment.

There are no codes whatsoever but the issue persists.

Jimmy Recard

17,540 posts

179 months

Friday 3rd November 2017
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If I'm near you any time soon (stands a chance) I'd be happy to get my Tech 2 on it. Probably won't yield any information if the others have done nothing though

M32Guy

62 posts

89 months

Friday 3rd November 2017
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First thing I'd do is wire a new earth from the ECU to an existing body point