My 2013 Chevy Cruze will intermittently start rough and then proceed to bog down and stall within the first 30 seconds of running, whether I am parked or have begun driving forward or in reverse. I don’t have any issues after this early startup timeframe, and if it stalls and I restart the engine, the problem doesn’t reoccur and run great. Most of the time occurring on a cold engine but has happened after a short (1 hour) downtime. If this occurs when I’m driving with a slow steady acceleration, the car kind of surges or hesitates in what feels like a jerky motion. If feel the car starting to bog down, I can either put it in park or neutral and rev the engine and it will allow the car to get past the roughness and run perfectly for the remainder of my drive. If I feel the rough start and left the car in park, the engine begins at 1,500 rpm like a normal cold start up, then after 20 seconds or so the RPMs will begin to lower to 900 or so, but then at this point the RPMs keep dropping and the car begins to sputter & I shut off the engine. Starting immediately after the car will start & run fine.
Have taken this to two Chevy dealers who found No Codes and conveniently the problem did not occur while they had it over several days. No check engine light appears when it stalls or have appeared recently.
In attempts to solve this I have had the fuel system cleaned, cleaned the mass airflow sensor, replaced the camshaft sensor. Plugs have about 35,000 miles on them with a new coil pack installed at same time. Seems like it could be a vacuum leak or problem with a sensor. I checked the PCV cover for a vacuum leak since this seemed to be somewhat common but did not feel any air escaping from there.
Has anyone had experience with a similar situation?
I suggest the engine coolant temp sensor is bad.
Coolant temp sensor a possibility. Another is oil pressure sender - or very low oil level causing low pressure. On many cars, the fuel pump will shut off if there is no oil pressure (or no signal that there is oil pressure.)
Have someone try cleaning the electronic throttle body.
Tester
Good ideas above. If it only occurred on cold starts I’d guess a too-lean condition. The engine computer is supposed to inject extra gas on cold starts, could be something wrong w/that. But since it occurs on warm starts too sometimes, I tend to discount that first idea. It could be a too-rich condition though, caused by an injector leaking fuel into the cylinder when the engine is turned off. That will definitely cause the engine to sputter at first, until all that excess fuel is burned or otherwise pushed out of the cylinder. Another idea is a problematic EGR valve or EGR system, if your engine uses EGR. Yet another idea, problematic crank position sensor. The latter is a fairly common problem reported here that may not set a diagnostic code. EGR problems will usually set diagnostic code.
If nothing above seems to help I think you’re looking at having the fuel pressure, ignition system, and exhaust system tested.
For what it’s worth I have been having this problem for a couple years and it has been getting progressively worse to the point where I have to keep it at 2k rpm for about a minute or it will die. Of course it’s winter now and -10°F so that may factor in. I haven’t taken it in because frankly I can’t afford it, but a lot of the digging I have done points to reprogramming/flashing the ECM and TCM. It makes sense because really it’s fine at first until it drops to that low idle, which is when it starts to struggle. Reprogramming this is supposed to help and if not maybe they have to ability to just prolong that high idle time to a couple minutes instead of 30 seconds and tadaa! Let me know what’s you find.
So your situation may be different than mine, but I eventually found that a cracked head gasket had allowed coolant to leak into one of the cylinders causing the rough starts and coolant to burn off internally. I hadn’t immediately noticed the low coolant issue because there was no external leak, so I’d monitor your coolant level and look for signs of white / sweet smelling exhaust smoke indicating antifreeze is burning off (probably going to be harder to see a difference in exhaust color due to it being so cold out right now).
If that is the case it’s not a cheap fix, but it’s better to find out sooner than later. Hopefully this helps and maybe you can rule something out
Every time I have had a car which was difficult to start and ran poorly, the problem was a head gasket leak, either from a cylinder to a coolant passage, or from one cylinder to another. This is why I am so skeptical when I see people selling a used car, and they say it has a “slight miss” or that it “runs a little rough” but “just probably needs a tune-up”. Yeah, right. If new spark plugs and ignition wires are all it needs to solve the problem, then why aren’t YOU fixing it before offering it for sale?