I saved this from another forum a few years ago. The person who replied ran a large fleet of Ducato vans and serviced all their own vehicles, so was quite knowledgeable.
I've owned a 2009 (09 plate) 2.3 Ducato Motorhome for 3 years, its
done 30,000 miles in total, and has been regularly serviced.
I recently drove it to Southern France for a holiday, and one day when I
started the engine, it would only tick over and wouldn't rev
up at all.
The accelerator pedal felt normal, and was operating up and down
freely as usual, but the engine just wasn't responding?
After about an hour of head scratching, and trying repeated starts there
was no change, so I called for breakdown assistance.
The fault couldn't be cured on-site, so we were recovered to a
French Fiat garage about 20 miles away.
The garage prioritised diagnosing our fault, and the next day they fitted
two main (genuine Fiat) parts as follows;
0071724306 Throttle body/Electrovanne EGR (E.S.) and 0504388760
Cables Assemblies
Their invoice shows two fault codes detected; P0638 and P0402
The van appeared to be performing normally again, so I paid their bill
and we headed North towards Calais.
The next morning on start up, the same fault happened again, the van
started OK, but had little or no throttle response.
Fortunately, this time the fault rectified itself after around 1 minute, and
the engine could then be revved up normally.
As we were by then around 200 miles North of the garage who'd
repaired the fault, we decided to continue on to Calais.
We are now back in the UK, and the van has done the same thing on
two further occasions, luckily clearing itself both times.
The fault is intermittent (for the moment) but obviously I would like to
get it permanently rectified.
Any thoughts on possible causes, and/or suggestions of the best way
forward from here?
Cheers, John
Hello,
I would say that the garage that diagnosed the fault were correct and the
throttle body did need to be replaced. However; in most instances when
the throttle body has been malfunctioning this puts a great deal of stress
on the electrical solenoid valve that operates the EGR as it frantically
tries to balance the inlet manifold pressure due to an unresponsive
throttle body. This solenoid valve sits behind the small metal plate that
is below the windscreen scuttle. Replacing this should solve the
problem. You can test the theory by locating the rubber pipe that comes
from the right hand side of the solenoid as you look at the engine and
gently pull it backwards and off. On occasions when we have had this
problem, we have switched off the engine, removed this pipe and
started the engine with no fault present.
It is known as an EGR solenoid valve. Fiat part number is 46524556
and equivalents are made by Pierburg and Intermotor for less than the
price of the Fiat item. Most motor factors should be able to supply these
if you give them the Fiat part number.