Hello everyone I am very new to this forum and to Fiat cars as well. Anyway I am experiencing some weird things with my car. It is a mk2 Punto Active with a 1.2 litre engine with a manual gearbox. Yesterday I was driving the car with my mum and sister in it and the engine management light came on and the car started making a loud whirring sound. We stopped and let it sit with the engine off for about half an hour. When we started it again the noise had stopped but the engine light was still on, the car also makes a whining sound when you drive past 40mph, with the sound getting higher pitched the faster you go. the engine itself seems fine its revving normally, coolant temperature is normal ect.. We are taking it to a mechanic tomorrow but in the meantime what do you guys think is wrong? Sorry for the long post by the way

Thanks

best would be to plug it to a computer and see what caused the engine management light to come on

Welcome to the forum,

Your description of the problem is pretty vague but I wonder if the whiring noise could be the engine bay cooling fan?

Or does the noise seem to coincide with the speed of the engine or speed of the car. So does it get higher and higher pitched as you get faster and faster or does the pitch change or drop when you change gears ?

The pitch does get higher as you go faster changing gears seems to have no effect

the fan only has 1 speed, been the 8v (very very few have aircon on the 8v's Rare like hens teeth)

A wiring could be anything
Worn auxiliary bearings - worn tensioner bearing or water pump
It could be driveline side

Without hearing or seeing it, its bloody hard to tell whats what

A Code read would be the first place to check why the EML is on
it might give you a clue on where to look, but very little us armchair diagnostics can do to help really without possibly a video and the code read

Ziggy

The car has seen the mechanic the reason the engine light was on was because the temperature sensor went wrong that has been reset
The whining noise turned out to be a worn wheel bearing that is being fixed later on

WolfCrazy64 said:

The car has seen the mechanic the reason the engine light was on was because the temperature sensor went wrong that has been reset
The whining noise turned out to be a worn wheel bearing that is being fixed later on

Click to expand...

Glad you got it sorted and it was fairly simple.