A few weeks ago while idling in traffic my car starts lurching forward on it’s own, RPMs jumping considerably while my foot is all the way on the brake. The car didn’t legitimately move forward, but was trying to, and would’ve if I wasn’t already braking. Pretty freaky thing to have happen when you’re in bumper to bumper traffic. I took it in to a vw dealership thinking it was a vacuum leak, they checked it out thoroughly, drove it a bunch, hooked it up to the computer, looked for error codes, the whole shebang. They said everything was fine and they didn’t know what could’ve caused it. I took my car home, but I swear it’s not quite right, acceleration feels weird, sometimes feels too slow to get going or too fast to get going, touchy in general.
Come today, I’m on my way to work, idling at a red light and the lurching thing happens again, only this time the RPM spike is little more drastic. It literally felt like my car was going to accelerate through the brake? Cue throwing the car into park and turning on my hazards in an inconvenient spot. Lurching still happens in park, I shut my engine off, give it about a minute, turn it back on, goes right to essentially accelerating on its own again. Turned it off again, waited 30 minutes or so in hopes cooling down would help, it does, and I was able to start it up and get it home. Again it didn’t feel normal, gas still either felt too touchy or laggy and I don’t dare drive on this problem in traffic.
Anyone got any ideas?
Your car is probably beyond carmaker’s warranty - but if the VW dealer has been unable to figure this out, I would contact VW corporate. See owners manual for how to. There may be a TSB or a regional tech person who can address this. Yes, the dealer should be doing this, but what can you do? Do what you can do.
Thank you, I’ll check this route out!
I’d also post this on VW forums (VWVortex, TheSamba) and see if anyone there has had this problem.
Will do, thank you
You wrote: “lurching still happens in park”. I hope you are saying that when you are in park, the engine surges. Or, is the car still trying to move forward?
Yeah, what I meant was while in park the engine still surges
Try a different local mechanic. There may be deposits on the throttle body that cause the throttle plate to stick and jerk. There may an ICM Idle Control Motor that needs attention.
+1
That would also be my prime suspect.