so my car is running odd and my friends and I have a couple ideas but I thought I'd ask here and see what kind of response I get....


In all gears but easiest to duplicate in 2nd and 3rd....

Spools up normally through the rpm's until I hit right around 4500..where boost should really be kicking in....instead it flattens out....almost drops off actually. Then it either doesn't come on or comes on wicked hard around 6k.

Fills like your clutch is slipping or if your driving on a rainy road and you slip and then grab. But my clutch is not slipping and neither are my wheels.

I don't here any odd noises and I don't have any CEL's.

I took it into the dealership a couple months ago because I parked at the golf course and had smoke billowing out of my hood scoop....oil burn off. The dealership couldn't find oil ANYWHERE and I am not dripping any oil out and I'm not burning any either apparently...my level isn't going down so it's not a regular thing. I've had this oil burn off smell and visible smoke probably 5 times now.

my car is pretty much stock engine wise.

 

sounds like knock correction, which shoudn't be happening.

 

He has an 04.


Disconnect your negative battery terminal and press the brake to reset the ecu.
You may have a tank of bad gas as well.

 

Is that true for all WRX's?

 

No, the 04+ WRX ECU runs like ***. When I was totally stock, I would get detonation under load.

I still think it could just be a batch of bad gas+ECU retardation.

 

Oh I wasn't talking about the problem, but about the ECU reset trick. (e.g. Disconnect your negative battery terminal and press the brake to reset the ecu)

can you do that with any WRX - I got a 03 and wouldn't mind giving it a try.

thanks

 

oooohhh! hehe, my bad.
Yes, that will work on any Subaru, and pretty much any other car I believe.

 

I'll wait till I get a good tank of gas and try it.

so all you do is:
1) Pop open the hood
2) Disconnect the Negative pod on the battery
3) Press the brake (do I have to hold it?)
4) Re-connect my Negative pod

and I should be good?

thanks for the tip...I didn't know about that.

 

Yep, that works on just about any car. Pressing the brake isn't some magic trick, it just drains the residual 'juice' left after disconnecting the battery (when you press the brake pedal the brake lights try to come on). This just speeds up the process. If you just unplug the battery and let the car sit for 5-10 minutes without pressing the brake pedal you will get the same effect.

-Chris

 

yep, you will see that your odometer will go blank too and you'll loose all of your radio settings. once its reconnected though your tripometers will be at zero, odo will be back where it was(internal battery on the cluster).

This resets all learned parameters in the ECU so it'll be like new again.

 

so I emptied the tank filled with chevron 91. Car is back to normal. Seems to me that it was a bad tank of gas since Jeff (ipozestu) is having issues after filling at the same station on the same day.

normal for my car is still not normal though..bah. but at least I have boost now. I was starting to worry that my waste gate was going or my turbo or something. I've had odd boost patterns and blown oil smoke out of the scoop a few times so I figured this was the last straw. But it's back to normal now......

 

another case of 87oct in the 91oct pump?

 

uhmm... just to be safe you should check up on that smoke from your scoop. even if you had gas worse than zoeb after outback it shouldn't cause smoke out of your hood.

 

The smoke is another issue that was before this problem with the gas.

 

I had that problem before. That's why I thought it was something other than bad gas at first when I started having the boost problems this time. Figured my turbo was finally letting go or what not.

I had the dealership check out the oil problem like 2 months ago. They couldn't find anything. I think it was blow bye. But every now and again i get crazy boost patterns.

But this time around it was clearly bad gas. I'm running fine after draining the gas and putting new gas in.

stupid 76.