A friend's taurus is consistently getting misfires on cyl 3 (on a v6). Car has 73000 miles on it and is completely stock. He said he ran the car completely out of gas a month or so ago and then 2 weeks ago he started getting the misfires. It seems like it misfires on lower loads like idle and speeds less than 30mph but at highway speeds it runs fine. Does anyone have any clue what to look for? His engine bay is more cramped than ours and I cant even get to the 3rd cylinder spark plug and fuel injector without pulling the intake manifold, so that'll be a last resort. Thanks for the help, Bobby
What year Taurus is it? I'm assuming it is an OBD 2 car (post 95). Is the issue apparent as soon as the car is started, or does it appear after it gets warmed up or has been driven for a few miles first? Depending on what the answers to the above questions are, I might have an idea of what the problem is...
It happens as soon as the car is cranked up and happens while the motor is cold, it gets a lot better as the motor warms up. Ironically we pulled the spark plug wire from the distributor and spark plug, reconnected them, and reset the ECU and the car drives fine now. we'll see if it comes back over time.
My father was having similar issues on his Mercury sable, but didn't run it out of gas. Seems he was getting gas from kroger every time. I told him to run some water treatment through and fill up a couple tanks at a known good location and it completely fixed his issues. From what I have been told by the tanker truckers that I have talked to (guys that haul the gas KNOW the condition of the tanks) Krogers and walmarts tend to have larger amounts of water in their tanks. When the 10% summer blends come out it will soak up a lot of that water and they start getting more complaints. I guess they just figure that it will fix the problem of the water each year at the expense of a couple of complaints from a couple customers. Other thought...is it possible when he ran it all the way out that some of the crud in the bottom of the gas tank could have been flushed through and maybe got stuck in the injector?