Your vacuum lines could be old and collapsing to the actuator when you hit the pedal. Once you top the hill and release the accelerator, the lines open back up. Have you checked Canadian Grizzle's how to?
Ordered new vacuum lines already, will try that, but I don't see how they're collapsing. I have full power out of the car for a solid 15-20 seconds. I can literally hold the car wide open for a while, but getting towards the top of the hill it will all of a sudden lose a substantial amount of power and continues in low power until I crest the hill and start cruising again. I would think if the lines were collapsing they would do so as soon as I rolled into the throttle and boost came up. I don't know, the hoses are cheap enough I'm going to replace them all anyways, they're in the trunk right now.
When I've had true limp mode occur, its never thrown the CEL either. Sometimes there are codes that don't trigger the CEL, but I have not had any codes present after a "limp mode" event. Just cycled the ignition OFF/ON and back to normal.
Others have had different results with that issue, as the causes can be one (or more) of several. Although I've never known of the anti-shudder valve causing a real limp mode.
I could see it not triggering the CEL I guess, but every thing else I read says the car needs to have the key cycled to get power back, and that's not the case for me.
Have you ever heard of limp mode resetting without the key being cycled?
Exactly, I sure haven't, but I haven't been a TDI member for a long time either.
Ours displayed those same symptoms, although a restart was required to regain normal engine ops. I could duplicate symptom at will. It was over boost due to incorrectly adjusted turbo actuating rod. Spend the money for VCDS and this repair alone will pay you back in spades.
That's what I don't get, no restart required.
Hi Mdub707,
If you hit limp mode, you'll know right away, sometimes it'll jolt the car, and it will usually throw a CEL.
I'd definitely look in your intake first, are you getting any smoke when the car loses power? In general, black smoke means not enough air/too much fuel, blue/grey smoke means a clogged fuel system/burning oil and white smoke is a coolant problem or just a cold car. Your stock exhaust scrubber could be plugged too. I even found at least 5lbs of soot inside my stock muffler!@!
The EGR delete will help only if your upper intake is clean, (culvert into straw theory). Also, do you use any diesel treatment when you fill up?
I had the exact same problem when I first bought my car, and as a noob (ha ha) I thought I had bought a lemon. When I opened up the EGR/intake, I had about a quarter-sized hole for the air to move through!! My muffler and scrubber were both deleted.
This is also a great starting point...thanks to Member Canadian_Grizzly!
http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=179589
Good luck,
-M.
I'm new to TDI's, but not new to diesels, coming from the truck side of things. No smoke at all, the car runs great and has full power for a while going up the hill. I need a really long hill to get these symptoms to show. I'm talking hills that are 1/2mile to 1 mile long. I can go at it and get almost to the top of the hill before it loses power, it's really odd. Definitely seems like it's cutting fuel to me. If it was an air issue and the turbo was snuffing out, I would expect the black smoke to start pouring, but I get nothing. To me that means fuel is cut. It's weird, it will have full power and pull the hill pretty good (considering it's only 90hp) and then all of a sudden a power loss and rpm's start dropping. So much power loss actually, it wont even accelerate up hill in 3rd gear, WOT and it was losing speed in 3rd.
I'm going to do the EGR delete, but I don't think that's the issue at hand here. I could be wrong though, but it seems like that would cause low power all the time, not just WOT up long hills?
I did read the write up about fixing limp mode, thus why I ordered the vacuum lines, figured it was an easy place to start. I will also check the MAF sensor too and probably just clean it too, I do have some MAF cleaner kicking around somewhere.
Oh, and as for getting the VAGCOM stuff... I know, I know. I just bought some software for my powerstroke not too long ago for the same price. Just hate spending more money right away haha.
Thanks for the input so far guys.
