I did a few searches and didn't see anything which directly addressed this:

My buddy's 02 civic stopped running the other day. He took it to San Francisco (about an hour away) and noticed some sluggish performace under hard acceleration. It got worse as he drove around SF, and found that the problem also occured while making sharper turns (like freeway onramps) at normal speeds, and the problem got worse and worse until eventually the car wouldn't start, but thankfully he made it back home by the time that happened.

So, of course he calls me, I head over and check spark plugs (all of them were firing), his compression (perfect), I smelled for fuel with the plugs out and it was definately there, but I don't check his timing (since he had been running fine for months and the car has only 30k miles on it), everything checks out. Nothing obviously wrong from looking under the hood. I couldn't really look into much else with the limited tool set I had. So, he has AAA tow it to his friend's garage, who's a professional mechanic.

He calls me back 2 days later and says essentially that all they did to get it running was replace the gas in his tank. They told him not to do any hard accelerating, and that he might have "some fuel system problems."

Anybody know what the real problem is? The only other information I can think of is that my boy had his oil changed about a week before this started happening.

 

car might have died because of alternator, alternator would definetely affect accelerating.

 

Bad gas can do that.

Even if you smell gas does not meen that you are geting enuff pressure. I would check the fuel pressure at different RPM's it may be the pump or regulator?

 

probably fuel pump / injectors or something similar.


:wtf:

 

Take it to a dealer. You can usually choke a few extra months of free repairs after the three year/30k warranty expires.

 

Check fuel pressure and timing/advance.

 

Well, the alternator probably wasn't it. All the did was replace fuel, and it started right up.

He had a quarter tank when his car wouldn't run anymore, so it's not like the gas was old or anything.

What I don't understand is why they told him he had fuel system issues and not to accelerate too hard, but apparently they didn't tell my boy what the problem actually was. And they "fixed" it by replacing fuel? I'm gonna hafta guess that a bad fill-up was all that did it, and nothing else. I dunno, just smells fishy

 

i have the same problem with my honda. The pump and strainer are not sitting true to the bottom of the tank or the pump bottom seal has cracked, or the hose is not tight/cracked./

 

Its just bad gas. When you get that low, the crap that was at the top of the tank goes down to the bottom and when its low enough it gets picked up by the pump. Thats why I never run my cars under 1/4 tank.