| Review: | Another Saga was a broken throttle casing. This occured when I was testing some performance figures one Sunday afternoon. Nothing too extreme but a nice afternoon out in the B10. After a number of 'blasts' I decided to turn round and head home. I found a convenient roundabout and started back home. Exiting the roundabout I came accross a slower moving hatch and moved to overtake it - about halfway past, the B10 stopped being fast. By that I mean the loud pedal wasn't working. In fact a nice message appear on my dash telling me that an engine override was happening. Not sure how much power I had but it felt about as much as my first car (Ford Fiesta 950)! As I was not sure what was happening I pulled over to investigate. Not convinced by car electrics I tried the BRST (big red switch treatment - an IT term for switch it off and on). Not that simple - same message, same lack of power. At this point I decided to limp home and ring BMW assist. They told me that there was little I could do, and that I should take it into Sytners.
Sytners had a look and identified that it was a problem with the throttle casing. The engine mangement is so clever that it realises there is a problem and then reduce engine load to a safe level - e.g. drops the power so you can continue to drive (to the nearest BM garage), without risking further problems. Thats pretty clever I have to admit.
Anyhow the broken part wasn't in stock, and needed to be shipped from Alpina's factory. Sytner did try putting a standard BMW one on but that broke about 25 seconds later - not quite sure what Alpina do to the throttle to cause this ? The part took just over a week to arrive and so I had the pleasure of a hire car. After a bit of wheeler dealing I manged to blag a Alfa 166 3.0 V6, which was quite acheivement as I was only entitled to an astra ! The part was fitted and everything was back to normal.
Subsequently on the car's second service (26k) my throttle was replaced due to a common fault that had been found on the B10s. | |
