UK-POLOS.NET - THE VW Polo Forum

Just bought a 2003 polo, 1.4 engine.
Cost me a whopping £150 [emoji4]
Needs a few bits and pieces done but it's a pretty solid car.

Put it in for its MOT the other day and the only thing it failed on was emmisions! HC is sitting at 0.48% when it should be below 0.3%.

Can you guys think of any quick fixes?




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Hi Tom

Engine serviced with new oil and oil/air filter ?
Any fault codes ? ( I use a cheap code reader)
Has the car been used for short journeys previously ?

I'll give it a shot, was planning on taking it for a service but now it won't start! Think the battery is flat!
Not sure about the journeys but in know it was owned by an older woman from new

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After giving it a proper service, maybe consider dosing it with a can of that cat cleaner stuff? Really just to try to get it through its MOT and so that you can start getting the use of it, as said maybe it is suffering from too much short journey running. I could guess that the manu-cat Lambda sensor is original and has reached the end of its useful life - but that would just be a guess, that sensor, I think sets up the base line mixture for the engine, so it can cause emission problems, a proper tune up place would probe that sensor's output signal to check before declaring it faulty/out of spec.

I'll give anything a try!

When we got our Polo,it was running ok but not very powerful.
So over a few months i gradually worked through a few things.
Oil,Oil and Air Filter
New Plugs
New CTS (coolant temp sensor)
Cleaned the EGR valve.
The CTS and EGR faults were flagged up by using my cheap code reader.
I got it from ebay and has been really handy for fault finding - it will not help with all problems but seems to cover the important faults.
She has been running much better since the work I have done on her.

U281 code reader