I've had my check engine light on for over a year now. The codes it gave was for all four cylinders misfiring and a random misfire. Most people who looked at it kept saying that if you've already replaced the spark plugs then its probably just coils or some wiring issue and "dont worry about it." I guess it finally caught up with me and after putting 20k miles on the light check engine light started flashing today and the car started driving super weird. I dropped it off at a dealership and they'll give me a quote tomorrow. In the meantime, anyone possibly know whats going on? what kinda damage am i looking at? worth taking student loans and fixing? etc etc. any help would be appreciated.


Update from dealership:

so im getting charged 80 bucks for the test. they pretty much just told me what autozone said - all four cylinders misfiring and a random misfire. They will not do a compression test as part of diagnostics and the MANAGER told me that i can come pay the money and take my car somewhere else or he wont return my car. The associate told me that the next step is to start with coils, then some sensors etc etc...

 

im sorry no one responded to you in time

misfire is bad, and is bad for your cat if unburned fuel is going down there. pay the $80 and get your car back. But in the future lookup how to read the codes with a paperclip.

Try to isolate which cylinders the misfire is happening in. to do this you can unplug the injectors from the cylinders one by one and see when it makes no difference (this is assuming that a coil is bad and the misfire is limited to 1 or 2 cylinders). Then to double check you can swap out a coil from one of the good ones to a bad one. If its just the coils then you can order one and swap it out.

 

This also happened to me. I had to end up buying an OBD2 reader. Here's what I did.

Found that cyl 4 was misfiring. Moved the coilpack to cyl 1. Reset code. Ran car for about 10 min until light came back on. Read code. It was cyl 1 that time. Moved coilpack to cyl 3. Repeat. Code pulled cyl 3. Replaced coilpack ($100). Reset code.

All is well now.

 

Since you believed this ^^

just pay the dealer the money to fix it.

 

thanks for the help everyone. I got to talk to the mechanic at the dealership who looked at my car. He said its all four cylinders misfiring but one bad coil could cause that too? He said to start with a compression test - if the pressure are OK then its electrical - if not then he said he highly suspects its an issue with a valve or piston ring.

 

Mine pulled two cyl misfires and the random misfire codes, even though only 1 coilpack was bad.

 

ive had misfire codes from all cylinders when it was just one bad coilpack