Coils Gone Again!

[Guest Paul W]

Well, my 2001 3.0 C5 Exclusive auto came up with the dreaded anti-pollution fault today and started misfiring badly - judders when stationary.

 

I strongly suspect it's the dratted coils again. Same thing happened in Aug 06 and I can't have done more than 5k miles since then :(

 

Anyhow, last time it cost me 3 hours @ £48 ph plus £19.92 for a new coil + VAT = £192.61 from my local Citroen specialist, Ray Williams of Burnham.

 

Does this cost sound reasonable? I know a non-specialist mechanic who will doubtless not charge £50 ph labour but will he need specialist knowledge to do the job?

[daffy4895]

it sounds to me as if you have an electrical fault somewhere, a coil pack shouldn't fail that soon, you could go to a normal machanic, but my advise would be to find a auto electrician as this is what he is trained for. he'll be able to track down an faults (or not as the case maybe) that casued a faulty coil pack. the labour charges you've mentioned are about average for a specialist, a normal machinic would charge around £30-£40 per hour, but he probably wouldn't find an electrical fault

[paul.h]

Could you not buy one coil and replace one at a time yourself until the faulty one is found ?

[kfk]

1st off you need to get a decode done to establish the reason why the message has come up........more then one thing will cause that message.

[Guest Paul W]

1st off you need to get a decode done to establish the reason why the message has come up........more then one thing will cause that message.

 

Thanks, I'm taking it to the specialist tomorrow and they'll do a decode.

[Guest rowls]

There was a problem with these original coils, the replacement ones you get from citroen are modified now. We had a C5 that used to come in every month or so with a different coil pack down, havent seen the car since all coils were eventually replaced with new ones (about 18 months ago now!)