Zafira EGR valve

zagmund

We have an 03 Zafira and it's been giving a little trouble lately. The other day after driving through the port tunnel and up the M1 as far as the airport it started konking (technical term meaning I could tell the engine wasn't well) a little and I knew something was up. As I was going around the roundabout at the airport it cut out but I restarted it while it was still moving and kept driving.

When I went to pull in at ths side of the road it just cut out altogether.

I called out my insurance roadside assistance and by the time the guy arrived it started and operated correctly so there was nothing for him to look at. He did drive behind me for a few KM but nothing developed so we left it at that.

Yesterday while driving in slow suburban traffic the same thing happened to the car while Mrs Zag was driving. It started konking and when she went to pull in it just cut out entirely.

It was towed to a garage and today they called to say the EGR valve needs to be replaced. I checked back through our receipts and I see we replaced the EGR valve almost exactly a year ago.

Now, when I google "zafira EGR valve" it throws up a whole series of threads which seem to indicate that the Zafira has problems with the EGR valve. Some of the people seem to take it out and clean it and some get stuck with a £200 or €250 charge to replace it by a garage. But the concensus seems to be that it will just go again.

Last time I checked into this forum it was asking about the Zafira guzzling oil and it turns out that the Zafira has problems with oil consumption too. I can kind of live with the oil issue - I just check it every so often and top up as required, but this EGR business is quite concerning.

It's generally accepted that it is not good for your car to lose power while driving along the road, so this EGR problem sounds like a pretty big one to me - enough to make me want to get rid of the car at this stage. I don't want to have the same problem in another 12 months as I'm turning right across moving traffic and I lose power and some bus drives into me as I'm stranded without power across the junction.

From reading some of the threads it looks like the EGR valve can just be removed and blanked out and nothing untoward happens, so I'm seriously considering this option. Does anyone think this is a *very bad* idea or is it a perfectly common sense solution which will save me money and keep the car running ?

z

shamwari

There is an official Opel fix applied to some of their cars where the EGR is indeed blanked off, and a software update is applied to the ECU to disabled EGR operation. If you blank off the EGR valve without performing the update, this will cause the EML to come on. I'd suggest ringing Opel to see if this fix can be applied to your car.

Getting a failed EGR so soon after replacement is a very strange thing to happen but not impossible. When the car cut out, would it restart immediately? If there was a "no start" after cutting out then I would be very surprised if the EGR was the cause of that. How did the garage arrive at the conclusion that the EGR was defective? Did they do a code scan? Personally, and assuming they did scan it, I would get them to clear the fault code(s) and drive again and see if the same fault codes reoccur. Alternatively, I'd get a garage that has a suitable scantool that can manually actuates the EGR valve to do such a test so that the EGR valves operation can be inspected off-vehicle.

If the garage did not do a code scan then I'd take the car elsewhere.