David Bliss
Member
* About 10 years ago I bought a Seicento and after about 20 000 miles had an odd thing happen. I had driven through a lot of heavy rain and decided to let the car dry outside before putting it in the garage. Later I started and drove it the few yards into the garage, the next day the engine would not start immediately and when it did it was definitely flooded, there were clouds of black smoke from the exhaust. At the time I just thought it was a one-off occurrence, but since then it happened several times, always after the car had been run briefly (seconds) from cold and then stopped and left and for more than 12 hours. Once I realized this I would always run the car down the road to get it hot before garaging it which prevented the problem happening again.
My daughter also has a Seicento and I warned her that if she needed to move her car a small amount to be sure to run the engine until it was hot before turning the ignition off. On one occasion she forgot and later the engine would not turn over, one cylinder had filled completely with petrol and had hydrauliced, stopping the engine from turning. Luckily I knew what the problem was and how to deal with it - by removing the plugs and spinning the engine over to expel the excess petrol I was able to sort things out without causing any damage to the engine. I talked to someone from our local garage about it and was told they had seen this problem at least three times on various Fiats and in all cases the engines had been badly damaged.
The other day the same happened to my Panda Active. I assume that, with age, in certain circumstances and on rare occasions, an injector will stick and with slight gas pressure from the fuel tank can flood one or more cylinders. When the injectors are hot they are unlikely to stick, so you should always run the engine long enough to get it hot. I do not know whether putting the occasional injector cleaning treatment through the system would alleviate the problem or not, but having lived with the weird problem for around 10 years I know how to avoid it so haven’t tried this cleaning treatment I just take the necessary precautions.
Has anyone else encountered this phenomenon? I haven’t seen it mentioned in other posts.
My daughter also has a Seicento and I warned her that if she needed to move her car a small amount to be sure to run the engine until it was hot before turning the ignition off. On one occasion she forgot and later the engine would not turn over, one cylinder had filled completely with petrol and had hydrauliced, stopping the engine from turning. Luckily I knew what the problem was and how to deal with it - by removing the plugs and spinning the engine over to expel the excess petrol I was able to sort things out without causing any damage to the engine. I talked to someone from our local garage about it and was told they had seen this problem at least three times on various Fiats and in all cases the engines had been badly damaged.
The other day the same happened to my Panda Active. I assume that, with age, in certain circumstances and on rare occasions, an injector will stick and with slight gas pressure from the fuel tank can flood one or more cylinders. When the injectors are hot they are unlikely to stick, so you should always run the engine long enough to get it hot. I do not know whether putting the occasional injector cleaning treatment through the system would alleviate the problem or not, but having lived with the weird problem for around 10 years I know how to avoid it so haven’t tried this cleaning treatment I just take the necessary precautions.
Has anyone else encountered this phenomenon? I haven’t seen it mentioned in other posts.