I bought my 1.4 Dart back in March. Late June and around 4000kms later, I realized, at highway speeds in 6th gear (manual), that under load it would shudder like there was lower octane gas (I run 92-94 oct)
Anyway, one trip out of town last week it did this in 5th gear. Bad shuddering under WOT, higher rpms. 400 km later, it was doing this in 2nd, 3rd, 4th gears. Then it would be violent shudders, and horrible performance. CEL came on finally
and I knew I was in trouble. It felt like it was running on 3 cylinders (it was). Car at the time had 10,000 km (5000 miles?)
So I dropped off at the dealership and they did the scans, and diagnostics. 2 hours later, go to pick up car and they showed me the spark plug that was.. BROKEN. I should have taken a picture of the damn thing. The electrode was fully snapped off!!
Luckily I didn't have a seized engine because of this. My car is bone STOCK. WTF would have caused this? Just a freak defect in the NGK spark plug? It did this from roughly day one (mild shudders at highway speeds in 6th), then progressively got worse.
Anyway, one trip out of town last week it did this in 5th gear. Bad shuddering under WOT, higher rpms. 400 km later, it was doing this in 2nd, 3rd, 4th gears. Then it would be violent shudders, and horrible performance. CEL came on finally
and I knew I was in trouble. It felt like it was running on 3 cylinders (it was). Car at the time had 10,000 km (5000 miles?)
So I dropped off at the dealership and they did the scans, and diagnostics. 2 hours later, go to pick up car and they showed me the spark plug that was.. BROKEN. I should have taken a picture of the damn thing. The electrode was fully snapped off!!
Luckily I didn't have a seized engine because of this. My car is bone STOCK. WTF would have caused this? Just a freak defect in the NGK spark plug? It did this from roughly day one (mild shudders at highway speeds in 6th), then progressively got worse.