barbarianhorde

Hey guy's I'm posting this on behalf of a friend. My friend has a 2003 Audi A4 1.8t Quattro and in the last 2 months he's had a laundry list of problems with the car. The issue I want to ask about in this thread his car has been running horribly, he took it down to the local Audi dealer roughly a month ago because he thought he had gotten bad gas. The dealer checked it out and said that there was nothing wrong, he asked them about the coil packs because he told me that the coils packs on these Audi's have a habit of going out rather frequently, they told him that the coil packs were absolutely fine. Well he didn't bother to heed to their advice and spent close to $400 on new coil packs a month ago, that didn't fix the problem and the car is still running horribly. About 3 weeks he took it to the same mechanic that I took my Audi to when I had one, and they replaced the fuel filter/fuel pump for him, which helped a bit but it's still not running right, you don't really have to know anything about cars to tell that there is something wrong. Fast forward to today, he called me a little while ago and told me that the car is misfiring really badly and that the month old coil packs are going out again. I've tried to explain to him that he needs to take the car to a good mechanic that specializes in German Cars Audi/VW/Porsche etc so that it can be properly diagnosed, of course he doesn't seem to want to listen to me which is frustrating as hell, not to mention he really doesn't know much about these cars to begin with, he told me that if he had $$ he would go out and buy replacement coil packs yet again and I told him not to do that because it's stupid to throw another $400 into the car when you have absolutely no idea what's wrong with it to begin with.


He's grasping at straws to put it politely when he tries to tell me what's wrong. I told him that there has to be something else wrong with the car that's the root of the problem, it wouldn't make any sense for the brand new coil packs to go out after a month, unless there was another issue that causing these problems to begin with. He told went on to explain that all of these coil packs are defective and that Audi merely changed the part numbers rather than doing a full recall and fixing the actual problem. I was just wondering if you guys might be able to throw down some ideas that I could present to him, I know there could be literally a million things going wrong but I'm just wondering if there would be a good point to start at and go through the list to see if I can possibly help him out, and input/advice would be GREATLY appreciated guys.

Diztek

Take it to autozone an scan for codes.

oceanbreeze

There are two ways to fix misfires. One is with a full scan (vcds) and proper diagnosis/GFF. It has a very high rate of success. It's quite easy, and as cost effective as it gets.

The other way is what your friend is doing.