Hi, my mother's 07 cooper base model seems to have a hunting idle at cold start, occasional missfire, and then intermittent check engine light showing, all of which are the symptoms of a high pressure fuel pump failure on a mini cooper S model.. except she has a non-s model which I am told is port injected and uses a in-tank fuel pump. WTF is causing this then? Anyone else have problems like this on NON S models?

 

Need to pull the code and post it back here. Could be a lot of different problems..

 

+1

 

Ok everyone the dreaded codes we finally got are:

P2187, P0300, P0301, P0304.

Sorry for the delay! Kinda hard trying to diagnose problems from 5000 miles away.

Thanks in advance,

Gabe

 

Aha...the obvious is that you have misfire on 1 and 4. swap the middle coil packs with the outer ones and see if the codes move.

 

So the funny thing is, I replaced the coil packs a year or two ago, I think I even have the old coils there in the garage. I did the spark plugs last summer as well so that will be a year in august. The car is in south florida so there is a 100% chance the coils can be fried again because of the heat. Knowing this, I removed the coil cover when I did the spark plugs because I remember that causing SR coil packs to fry back when I had one.

What about the other codes?

 

Just go through the exercise and see what happens.

p0300 is random misfire that relates to p0301 and p0304.
p2187 is system to lean which is a cause for the misfire or the result.

 

Agree. It's important to see if a different coil changes as it's moved. Mark them so you can later tell which came from which place.

 

Ok, an update-

So via the wonders of facetime I showed my Mom how to swap the coils so we swapped 1 to 2 and 3 to 4. No change to drivability or misfire.

Issue is I cannot confirm this because I don't have the codes re-done. Most of this falls on my mother being a lunatic and me being 5,000 miles away, but I am doing my best here. ****How can I reset the CEL?!?!****

Supposedly, she brought her car to a local mechanic today whom proceeded to swap coils back and forth, along with change spark plugs to no avail. This fellow then suggested that it could be the PCV valve, and I was sent a photo of an orange disk looking thing, located on the top left of the valve cover, basically at 10-o'clock of cylinder 1.

Now, to me, I cant see how PCV valve might effect misfire unless its like 10000% blocked and you were getting oil blowing past the rings, but you would see fouled plugs, not lean-burned plugs.

My various google searches do not bring up anything on clogged PCVs on N12 engines, nor can I find any pictures of the orange disk thing. Can anyone confirm its function? Should this lead to misfire?

Thanks in advance,

Gabe

 

Can anyone help me out here with the updated info I posted above?

 

The orange thing works as a check valve, i think.
On my R55S, i used an after market valve cover and after few hundred miles (500+), i got a CEL. Codes were for misfire on ALL cylinders and another code (engine in homogeneous mode). I put back the orig valve cover and all were ok.
So a vacuum leak could and may cause misfire. Also, what prompted all of this? Could the timing be off? Fuel injectors? Fuse box got water? The list goes on...
Where is the car located?