I've checked the gas cap and oil cap. Both are tight. My durametric is 3 hours away. I'm getting an occasional blinking CEl and more consistently a solid CEL. I'm in indian country and need some advice on whether or not to drive it home or just leave it and work out how to get it home. As far as I can figure out a blinking CEL means PARK THE CAR NOW and a solid is ok to drive. What about an occasional blinking and solid CEL?

The only thing that happened down here is we had a TON of rain over a short period of time. Wonder if that's an issue? Any advice would be helpful before I try to drive the car home and potentially wreck it.

Thank you

 

is the blinking intermittent? or does it have a pattern?.... blinking is def park it now.

 

Any update here?

 

cats are going bad due to a missfire. It's the car running rough?

 

which is probably a severe misfire. Misfire results in unburned gas being fed to converters whiich will burn in the converters and will overheat and destroy them.

Typically misfires are intermittent, temporary in nature.

Was engine hot or cold when light starting blinking? If cold or not fully warmed up I'm thinking moisture in one or more cracked coil packs causing misfire and once engine warmed up enough to drive moisture out of coil pack(s) misfire will be gone, though of course the packs that have the cracks remain and should be id'd and replaced.

Hoever, if misfire continues the whole time engine warming up, even at idle... damage to converters almost certainly will occur.

Beg, borrow or steal a nice blower style hair dryer and get access to coil packs and use hair dryer to heat/dry them out. Sort of a long shot, but about all I think of other than having car flat bedded to dealer to have misfire source id'd and cause rectified.

If misfire does go away avoid driving through standing water as much as possible, even driving in rain, and get car someplace you can at least have coil packs checked out. This would of course involve pulling error codes to see if codes misfire related or caused by something else. Might be something else perhaps a VarioCam controller gone bad or something worse related to camchain guide/tensioner but there are a jillion misfire incidents arising from bad coil packs and this is what I'm assuming is the case with your car.

If after you dry coil packs and blinking light remains you need to pull codes at least and post for input. Might portend something deeper going wrong and the less then engine started and the car driven the more likely more serious damage occurs.

Sincerely,

Macster.

 

Thank you all for taking time to respond to my problem. Yesterday morning I started the car and the misfire was gone and the car ran properly. I reset the CEL and thus far it has stayed off. We had a huge rainstorm the other day and can't help but wonder if that had something to do with the CEL blinking and misfire. I'm heading home and will hook the car up to my Durametric and see what it was.

THANK YOU ALL for your advice.

 

check the outside surface of the cats. if they are blackish... they are gone. The CEL will come back in a week or two. Your coils are busted too. (cracked) I know because it happened to me. Cats are warrantee by porsche NA for up to 84,000 miles.