First time ever my 5 year old Stilo failed to start today. Called out AA homestart and guy told me the engine was flooded with fuel as I had started it very briefly the night before to move it back a few yards in the street. He said this was not long enough for the engine management system to register the correct response and was the cause of the problem. He did manage to start it by flooring the accelerator and churning the starter motor. All is now OK and he said it was also a particularly bad problem with Nissan Micras.

The lesson here is not to do a momentary start/stop with a cold engine.

People of a certain generation know all about engine flooding and how to restart a car which is flooded.

If you've driven a car with a manual choke there is a fair chance you've flooded an engine and learned how to restart it.

My technique was choke back in, pump accelerator a few times, wait a couple of minutes, clutch down, turn over until car splutters (but won't run due to choke being in), then choke out and try to start again. Sounds pretty similar on modern cars to be honest.

Yes, I'm old enough to remember carbs and chokes. You might think electronic engine management had solved any flooding problems but not so. What I described is endemic to Stilos and will certainly happen if the engine is switched off within seconds of a cold start.

I've never had to crank my Stilo 1.2.

I have just experienced the very same problem on my 1.6 and I would like to thank Jim for writing about his experience. I was about to call the scrappie to come and take my wreck away when I saw this thread and it inspired me to try again.

I too had backed up a yard or two and switched off the engine, then had not used the car for a week. When I did, it fired briefly then died, and showed no further signs of life. Checked for fuel pressure and that seemed healthy enough. Checked for spark so I knew the crank sensor, etc, was okay. With no faults reported by the ECU (seems to me it only reports faults AFTER starting which is pretty useless) I began to wonder about a catastrophic mechanical failure. I checked that the camshafts were turning, but without a compression tester there was little else I could do.

I took out a spark plug and noticed it was damp with what smelt and felt like petrol so I removed the fuel pump fuse (F22 on the 1.6) and cranked the engine a bit. It showed signs of life, but after restoring the fuel pump the engine seemed again moribund. I noticed a whirring from the throttle body which I had not noticed before, and I began to suspect it might be to blame. I have on several occasions started the engine with the throttle body disconnected and I tried that but still nothing. (It seems the throttle body hunts during starting, opening and closing ever so slightly, causing the whirring sound.)

Then I saw this thread so I charged the battery overnight and cranked the engine for five or ten minutes (30 seconds at a time so as not to overheat the battery) and slowly it began to cough and splutter and after several false starts it eventually took and misfired away for several minutes, with an alarming knocking from the engine which made me wonder again about that catastrophic failure. Under normal circumstances the knocking would have been enough to make me stop the engine and investigate, but by this stage I was just happy it was breathing. (I was reminded of the birth of my daughter: when the obstetrician said "it's a girl" I thought to myself, I don't care if it's a lizard, as long as it's alive!)

After 15 or 20 minutes the idling settled down and the knocking faded. Then I applied the MAP and throttle relearning procedures I had seen elsewhere on this forum. I find it hard to believe that anyone would design a system that requires such procedures (but then I am even more reluctant to believe that anyone would design a fuel injection system that floods the engine even worse than a carburettor could - is this flooding problem common to all fuel injections systems?) but now the car seems to be going better than it has in ages. Just my imagination, perhaps.

Anyway, thanks again to Jim and everyone else who posts useful (or even inspirational) information on this forum. (But no thanks to those who post sarcastic comments!)

I experienced the same issue with my Stilo 1.2 a few times , and we have also expperienced it with a marea . The secret is: no very short runs -when I move the cars in the driveway I now always run them until warm.