Cracked coil packs

Coils don’t have any moving parts, so how do they crack? First of all, VW and Audi don’t make their own coils and coil packs. They have them made by major manufacturers like Bosch, Temic and Beru. While there are no moving parts, the coils do wear. Heat, time in use, and the quality of the coil pack have everything to do with how long one survives.

Attention to detail is vital to a proper inspection.

A mechanic who is too lazy to remove the coil and fully check it out would cost this customer some serious money. Here is how.

A cracked coil pack can cause a skip, especially in wet or damp weather. A skip is where one cylinder of the engine isn’t firing. When one cylinder isn’t firing, the air and fuel goes through the engine without burning, and into the catalytic converter. Converters are dumb. They can’t throttle themselves. They just burn harmful things, converting them into harmless gases. So if you have one cylinder not firing, raw fuel and air enters the converter, and the converter burns that charge, even to the point where it melts down inside.

The catalytic converter costs big bucks. It is made of stainless steel, platinum, palladium and rhodium. All of these materials are pricey and some are worth more than gold. It only takes a few short minutes of driving with a skip to slag one. Once the converter stops working, the check engine light comes on and nags you until you replace it. If it slags completely, the exhaust can clog and the car will not make enough power to drive down the road. Kind of like a potato in your tailpipe.

Since 1996, cars have a check engine light that flashes on and off when the engine is misfiring. Pull the car over if the check engine light flashes. It is far cheaper to have the car brought in and the ignition fixed than to drive it home and have us fix the ignition and install a new cat.

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