This shouldn’t have been a big deal. I guess in the end it wasn’t really, but with work and other stuff going on the car was off the road for almost six weeks. My WRX which was supposed to be stock and reliable and wrench free. That’s why I bought this car right?? To be a get in and drive car… not a tease me, love me, not tonight car. Apparently flashing MIL’s are pretty common on GD WRX’s though, and if I had done decent research before buying I would have known this. On any given day there must be at least one GD on local classifieds with a mis-fire and a disclaimer that all it needs is a new coil!
If only it were always so simple.
I learned a couple things from this ordeal. They are (1) don’t trust the freaking manual and (2) if I’m going to let a car cut me, it had better be hard and sharp when all is said and done. The first is maybe only true of Subaru’s, the second is why stock cars are only good if they’re reliable. I put energy into my car and yet it’s still as plain and boring as the WRX my aunt has been driving to work for five years?? Forget that. Next time I have to undo a bolt I’m going to replace it with a hollowed out titanium one, or at least throw that bolt in the garbage and re-incarnate my tin can 86 as a lightweight Subaru.
At least now I’m back on the road… and there are still 15cm of snow forecasted for tomorrow.
So what was the cause of the misfire, if not the coil?
ha. Discovered to be a bad injector… which was somehow intermittently bad until the very end, and I wasn’t able to catch it until I tested them all with an ohm meter and re-arranged them on different cylinders.