icks90

Hope you good chaps may be able to help me with an urgent and stressful problem i'm having with my 2.7t A6 allroad 2002 reg.

Over the last couple of days its been taking longer and longer to start. Its almost like you;ve run out of fuel, put new gas in and then are turning the car over to 'suck it through' and you have to keep your foot down until the revs pick up. When the car is warm, it will fire strait up. But when cold it can take 100+ cranks to fire up (maybe more as i cant count that quick) during this time it spins over doing nothing for a short while, then you can hear and feel the car trying to fire and smell a lot of petrol coming out the back and then it starts to misfire its way to life and then eventually evens out to a nice burble burble. Once started, it drives absolutely fine.
I have noticed that once it does finally start, the air pump thingy that runs for the first 60 seconds isnt running (its a bit noisy!) and the revs are steady at 700rpm. Normally when cold it revs about 900rpm like autochoke is engaged and the air pump whines for 60 seconds.

I havent had a chance to run VCDS on it yet, but the dash is clear with no CEL at the moment.

any help would be awesome, as I just get this nagging feeling this car is going to leave me stranded and I just cant afford not to work at the moment!

thanks again guys,
Nick

allroad'n

what is the outside temperature like? if it gets any colder than -3ish Fahrenheit, my car starts then dies, and gas leaks from the fuel rail. idk if the gas gels up and becomes to think to pump through the injector or what. but you definitely don't want gas pouring over your engine.

icks90

sorry for the cross post with the A6 forum - looks like its a failed coolant temp sensor, as when its cold first thing in the morning, VCDS was showing coolant temp at 73C...

allroad'n

lol well im glad you found your problem.