Last weekend I drove to the mountains in very cold weather. Among the many things working against my milage I noticed that my engine DOES NOT like cold starts (no preheat) when it's below -15°C. Its idle is a little rough, and takes a looong time to warm up. But it starts OK, on the first turn, which is funny because I've been getting a
gong signal for the last 2 months, which apparently means that the battery voltage is low (but the battery icon doesn't light up on the dash). But the engine starts much smoother than it did in the summer
This morning I checked that the battery's voltage is 12.55V, which is very good for a 7 year old after a night at -17°C.
Engine warm up time was tragic - After a -18°C night the first 20 km of the return trip was downhill. After 12km the coolant temp was only 45°C
Yeah, the passengers were asking about when the heat will start to flow
With the upper grille block my temps were usually slightly higher (84°-90°) than without (78°), but now they hardly ever were that high. Parking the car for only 5-10 minutes dropped the temperature by that many degrees. Coasting with the engine off for only 2km also cooled it by 8°-10°.
Good thing that I switched the oil from 5w30 to 0w30
I also had a small problem on the highway: On pretty much every trip I get error code P0234 when oil in the intake momentarily clogs the post-turbo pressure sensor. This time I noticed that the engine suddenly lost some power - it was very reluctant when accelerating just under 90 km/h and 2k rpm. I tried keying off to reset the ECU, but that didn't change anything, so I stopped, opened the hood, checked that everything is in place (didn't touch anything except for the oil dipstick), started up and everything was OK again. I'm not sure if this was related to P0234, but it sure looked like something caused a limp home mode.
I'd normally be happy that I managed better fuel consumption than my EPA (ECE, or whatever) on each leg of the trip, but not when that still ruins my average
This tank is a bummer anyway...