AR 4 S.S.S.

Is there a known issue with the Catalytic Converter?

My check engine light has come on a couple times and the dealer said they may need to change the catalytic converter the next time it comes on....

gragravar

mine was replaced at 67K miles on audi's dime - those are warranty until 80K miles.

girlroad

Almost the same mileage for me as well.

rdar

Re: Join the group, what are the codes?

NJAllroad

Or not, codes on mine indicated converter replacement. New (or so I was told) procedure is to re-flash the ECM in an effort to clear the possibility of faulty codes. The stealer that did this for me managed to burn up the ECM in the process, at the time the ECM was on national back order. I was in a rental car and was forced to keep driving it on my dime until the ECM became available. It took a considerable effort to AoA to step up and compensate me for the rental cost due to the not available part. The check finally arrived yesterday, less the $25 in security fees and sales tax. Nice of them.....

Anyway, once the new ECM was installed no new converters were needed.

paulroad

The dealer is not at fault on this.

There was a recall of allroads. The ECU stock program had a gltich that was causing the O2 sensors to burn out and throw codes. If the fault was left too long (no codes in some cases), the burnt out O2 sensors would send a wrong signal that would cause the fuel mixture to be set improperly tereby casuing cat(s) to fail.

The solution to this was to reflash the ECU/ECM. In my case my ECU was ...521R after the dealer flash it was ...521S.

One problem with the reflash was that the actual cars that had the true glitch (mine did not) wound up with fried ECU/ECM as a result of the reflash. In actuallity, the fried ECU was also a symptom of the bad code. Many fried ECUs = national back order. Your dealer is not at fault.

NJAllroad

Too bad they didn't make the effort to explain it to me. I was only told that we burned up ECM while doing the re-flash, your statement makes more sense to me.

gragravar

after sitting in the waiting area for 20 minutes they brought the car back and said oops, the 03's and beyond do not need the reflash, it must really be the cats. so I got to make an appointment to come back a couple days later to get the cat done.

oh well.


BTW, also discussed the reflash with a tuner and got the following explanation: the cats need to reach a certain temp to operatate at their optimum. The ECU monitors the temp of the cat at various time increments following start up, the new software allows the cat an additional 20 or 30 seconds to reach that operating temp before throwing a code. sounds like in the earlier (01 & 02) cars, audi was expecting the cats to warm faster than they were, thus the re-write.

blackIIIroad

The K code is the one that needs to be reflashed to M for tiptronic ECU's.