hey guys first of all this websire is amazing already helped out with a couple of my problems but i got a new one..

i have 2004 rx8 six speed completely stock and a couple of nights ago i was driving the car was working just fine and my gas light came on sso i pulled into a shell and filled up on $20 wirth of medium grade gasoline.. after of about 50 feet of driving out of the gas station i saw that my car idle was fluctuating as i was trying to drive.. like my vehicle was jerking with my foot pressing on the gas.. i had pulled over and i checked all the indicators other than the chech egine light flashing everything else was good.. my buddy said it might be just bad gas so we went to a racetrak gas station and filled up on premium and put stp octane booster.. after of about a half a mile of driving the car was working fine and responsive in fact even sounded better.. but the check engine light was still on..

so after that night and the next morning check engine light turned off and the car worked awesome.. but then that next day in the after noon it started acting up again.. the accelerator was not really responsive, i couldnt accelerate when i pushed the gas. it seeemed like it would only stay at one level of acceleration no mater how much i pushed the gas.. when i would would idle a stop light the revs would go anywhere from 1500 down to almost 0 almost seeming like it would die and then back to about 800.. check engine light came back on and the rev of fluctuate while driving and the drive was sluggish.. and towards the end of my venture my car started to give out whiteish smoke from under the car.. looked like it came from the exhaust from under the middle of the car.. but other than that no engine temp too high or anything else like that..

i could really use some help..

 

white smoke = usually a bad sign of coolant leaking somewhere.

We need maintainance history, miles on the car, miles on the cat, how old are the coils, how old are the spark plugs, have you tried cleaning the maf sensor, did you get the code when the engine light was on?

What concerns me is your nonchalant reaction to the CEL as "other than the [check engine] light flashing everything else was good". CEL's are usually a big deal and shouldn't have been ignored.

 

i havent cleaned anything yet but im gonna get it scanned today to get the codes from the cel.. the miles are just under 100k.. spark plugs were replaced about 4 months ago..

when i get the DTC's off the car, i will post them up to let you guys know. i will also clean the MAF today after i get off of work. ontop of everything, the car is running on the rich side. a little bit of smoke is coming from the exhaust.

 

color of smoke? pungent smell? smoke when warm or only when cold?

 

at first the smoke was white not a dense though the smell was pretty strong like and smelled burnt and on saturday it started to smoke when warm but today when i moved it smoked when it was cold/warming up..

 

https://www.rx8club.com/showthread.p...uctuating+idle

it seems pretty similar to this members issue.

 

You could have an issue with your cat, but your description of white smoke isn't good.

#1 thing to do is get the code read. Once you have the code, search here for possible solutions.

 

yeah thats what other buddies of mine were telling me and thats what we suspect.. im definatly gonna look into it and get the codes..

 

Hey so just to confirm and give insight to what happened I got the codes and there was two..

P0302- cylinder 2 missfire..
P2097- post cat too rich

So me and my buddy first took out the cat and gutted it and completely took out all of the filtering in it and then cleaned the spark plugs.. the cat was completely collapsed and the plugs were a bit dirty..

So then after that we lowered the lift and started the car the car still had power loss and hardly any throttle response.. so we did another diagnostics and the p2097 code went away but the other was still there.. so we changed the coil packs and swapped both pairs of coils and ran another test and the code changed from cylinder 2 to cylinder 1 so we knew that thd coils were bad..

And we changed the coils and the car runs great and sounds like aa bit of a fart but its smooth now..