I’m having a stalling problem with my 2006 (not turbo) with 123xxx miles. The problem begins religiously after running 2-4 minutes. I have a loss of power/stuttering and stalling. Some times I can feather the gas pedal and keep it running and it straightens out if if pull over and rev it in neutral. Other times it just stops and I can’t restart it without letting it sit a while.

The car is a rarely used 2nd vehicle-I just had it inspected and it had 40 miles on it since last inspection. It has not been used regularly in a year and a half. When it was used, it was driven about 3 blocks to get our child from school and come home. And moved every 2 weeks for the street sweeper, but even then, only around the block to get it off the street, then right back to its parking space. The idle control valve/module was replaced as well as the cam position sensor to try to get rid of the stalling issue with no success.



The garage that just inspected it told me for the stalling, that the gas was too old and they cleaned the throttle body because it looked bad due to the old gas. They told me to put some high-test in it and it should run better. So I drove it to the gas station. It died again half way there. I let it sit for over 6 hours. I got 5 gallons of 93 octane gas and put it in the tank that was 1/4 full. I also added a bottle of STP gas treatment. The car started after about 4 tries, and ran the usual 2-4 minutes until it died again, this time at least in my neighborhood. Distance was probably around a half mile. I let it sit 17 hours and went out today and can’t get it to even start and keep running. It turns over, runs a second, then dies out. I tried this 4 or 5 times and gave up. This is the first time it wouldn’t even start for me.



I went back to my garage today and they seem to think that it’s still a gas issue, that i need to run it a few minutes to ‘get that better gas in there’. I’d try it if I could get the thing started. Wouldn’t ‘that better gas’ get to the engine fairly quick once started and running, even if for only a couple minutes? Would the 5 gallons of good stuff not be enough to boost that gas up a bit and get it to run better/not die? Because I got the normal run time out of it til it died—nothing has changed. The garage said if I can get it there again, they can look into a fuel filter/pressure issue. If I had “bad gas” how could it run fine for a few minutes then all of a sudden act up and die? Every time? To me it sounds like they took the low hanging fruit and went with it. I don’t even think they did any kind of road test with the car, because it would have died on them too. And I’d had heard about it, I believe.



Since 12/19, the following things have been fixed on the car: Coolant temp sensor replaced (for an overheating problem), fan relay (trying to track down the overheating problem), idle control valve replaced, and cam position sensor replaced.



I’m $900 into this car in 1.5 years that hasn’t ran good enough to use in any kind of way. If I can get this running reliably again I have no problem making it my daily driver for work. I just don’t want to get caught playing whack-a-mole running this problem down and running up hundreds more dollars in garage bills to get there. Not to mention i’m still running the original timing belt, water pump, etc and that could all still be looming for me yet down the road.



Any thoughts as to where I can turn my and the garage’s attention to on this stalling issue? Does the fuel filter/pump/fuel pressure suggestions make sense? Any ideas would be appreciated!