Every now and then when I go to fire up my car for the first time of the day (sometimes in the afternoon sometimes in the morning) the car starts in the failsafe mode. If I turn it off and wait a while and try again it will usually start right up with no problem, the first time this happened I thought it was a fluke but it has happened several times since. Twice it has left the check engine light on for a bit but eventually that turns off on its own several hours later, with the exception of the last time which stayed on several days until I put the stock mufflers back on. I only have the Steeda Shifter installed (probably not the problem) and did the muffler delete. All of this started after the delete but has fixed itself while they were still off and then went a long time before happening again until recently. It happened Saturday, I put the stock mufflers back on after getting the fail safe to go away, this got rid of the check engine light (thinking it was the lack of back pressure) but this morning I was taking it to Ford to have them look at it, the fail safe came back on with the stock mufflers on it. This time it took a lot longer to get it to start normal but it eventually did. The car has been used by K&N and JBA for R&D of there product but doesnt have them on yet. I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this or knows wht might be wrong, not to confident with the service department they dont seem to know their **** from their elbow and will probably have the car all day long and then tell me that there is nothing wrong with it only for it to happen again tomorrow. I also live in So Cal so its not too cold or too hot, there is plenty of coolant in there, it has been raining the last couple of days and so it is a bit colder than normal, in fact the last time this happened it also rained (coincidence?). For now the car is at Ford, they told me that it would take all day just to hook it to a computer and run it to check to see what codes came up which is a crock of you know what, but what can I do, the other to dealerships I contacted said the same thing, but I was hoping someone out there might be able to shed some light on this for me. And does anyone out there live in the San Diego area that has a way of pulling the codes ourselves for future reference. Thanks.

 

Take it to your dealer to get serviced

 

Please read before making a post as if I were some kind of schmuck that dont know jack.

 

*edit* mouth in mtion before mind in gear. disregard

 

I am interested in what they say. The only mod you have done is the muffler delete, correct ?

-Bryan

 

Coil-bank- misfire, you need the TSB for the Coil/ECU re-flash

The muffler delete IMO is maybe only a marginal contributor to the CEL coming on, as you are changing the flow of the exhaust gas pulse. My bet is that fancy ignitor has a temp pickup as well to detect misfires or cylinder head temp's and it reports it back to the ecu to modify the fuel pressure in case the temps get too high (running lean) I am aware that this is the function of the O2 sensor but if I was engineering the thing I would want the computer to know what the cylinder temp is too at any given time, not just the exhaust temp/ A/F as it enters the cat. So when you deleted the mufflers extra hot exhaust gases pulse back through the open exhaust port and this triggers the ignitor temp signal (maybe..) and kicks on the CEL. This cycle can happen at the very instant you turn the motor over and the very first pulse of exhaust gas not exiting properly away from the exhaust port...

Just a thought, but you will have to look up and see if there is some type of integrated signal pick up in the coil on plug ignitor. (because I am not sure)

Anyways actually removing the mufflers I dont think is the root problem and is more then likely software related in the timing cycle program, spark cycle etc anyways the Coil management portion- the coil-bank-misfire is not supposed to be an actual machanical fault, just a sensor map fault in the program.