its my girlfriends
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- Jul 11, 2010
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Whats up guys. My girlfriend has an 06 cobalt LS auto. We have about 104k on it, but she bought it at about 60k 2 years ago from her bank as a repo. We know the car started life as a rental car, the bought buy some African dude who turned it in as voluntary repo when he went back to his country. I just recently changed the oil, air filter, fuel filter, spark plugs, new battery, and new ECM. I searched the site and the closest thing I found to my issue was the TC tensioner but its not dead on with our issue.
Now that you have the history/specs, here's the issue. From the time she bought the car it would occasionally do a sputter at start up. Almost as if the timing was off a few teeth(i know this sound due to my old mr2's timing belt jumping a few). But she could simply kill the engine and restart the car and it would be fine. It only did it maybe once every couple of months back then and continued that way until recently. The issue got a little more frequent about a month ago. Happening almost once a week and no longer being corrected by only 1 restart. In fact most of the time it took 2-5 to get it running smooth. I started with the basics 2 weeks ago. i did an oil change, air filter and fuel filter. I assumed it was the fuel filter since most of the time I could turn on the switch until the pump stopped running and it would start perfect every time, plus i found out it still had the OEM filter at 103k when I started doing all of this work. After a filter change I thought it was fixed. We drove it to the beach (300 miles), lot of start and stops, no issues at all. A week later(1 week ago) it starts doing this shit again! Over the course of the following week it got even worse and within the past few days, its to the point it literally take about 10-15 tries to start the car, hot or cold start its the same issue. So we replaced the plugs (also oem lol), Again, fine for about 24hrs then it started back. Yesterday the check engine light came on. She took it to the genius' at autozone and the obd scanner said "random misfire". So after talking to a buddy(ASE mechanic buddy) with a similar issue in his Vue, we figured ECM was it since thats what fixed his problem. Today I replaced the ECM due to a similar issue my buddy had in his Vue with this being the solution. Nothing, if anything it got worse.
So heres where I'm stuck. I figure its got to be something timing related due to the fact that after a few tries its almost like it lands on a sweet spot and fires up and runs perfect. but if you dont hit that spot it spins over for much longer than normal(even if you let go of the key, just keeps spinning lol) and whn it finally does start its idling around 500 and if you rev it up a little it sounds like other cars do when the firing order is off. I was going to run it through the stealership tomorrow, but I figured I'd check here first and see if its something that could save me money. She hauls our 6 month old baby girl around in this car and I dont want them being left stranded. I tried talking her into buying a rotary car but she owes too much on this one lol. Thanks guys.
Now that you have the history/specs, here's the issue. From the time she bought the car it would occasionally do a sputter at start up. Almost as if the timing was off a few teeth(i know this sound due to my old mr2's timing belt jumping a few). But she could simply kill the engine and restart the car and it would be fine. It only did it maybe once every couple of months back then and continued that way until recently. The issue got a little more frequent about a month ago. Happening almost once a week and no longer being corrected by only 1 restart. In fact most of the time it took 2-5 to get it running smooth. I started with the basics 2 weeks ago. i did an oil change, air filter and fuel filter. I assumed it was the fuel filter since most of the time I could turn on the switch until the pump stopped running and it would start perfect every time, plus i found out it still had the OEM filter at 103k when I started doing all of this work. After a filter change I thought it was fixed. We drove it to the beach (300 miles), lot of start and stops, no issues at all. A week later(1 week ago) it starts doing this shit again! Over the course of the following week it got even worse and within the past few days, its to the point it literally take about 10-15 tries to start the car, hot or cold start its the same issue. So we replaced the plugs (also oem lol), Again, fine for about 24hrs then it started back. Yesterday the check engine light came on. She took it to the genius' at autozone and the obd scanner said "random misfire". So after talking to a buddy(ASE mechanic buddy) with a similar issue in his Vue, we figured ECM was it since thats what fixed his problem. Today I replaced the ECM due to a similar issue my buddy had in his Vue with this being the solution. Nothing, if anything it got worse.
So heres where I'm stuck. I figure its got to be something timing related due to the fact that after a few tries its almost like it lands on a sweet spot and fires up and runs perfect. but if you dont hit that spot it spins over for much longer than normal(even if you let go of the key, just keeps spinning lol) and whn it finally does start its idling around 500 and if you rev it up a little it sounds like other cars do when the firing order is off. I was going to run it through the stealership tomorrow, but I figured I'd check here first and see if its something that could save me money. She hauls our 6 month old baby girl around in this car and I dont want them being left stranded. I tried talking her into buying a rotary car but she owes too much on this one lol. Thanks guys.
