elroyjetsn

The US Spark has the CVT that is also used by Toyota, Honda, and others. Currently, the only one that has a dual range feature. Sort of a hybrid tranny and has 2 gears combined with the belt and pulley arrangement. That gives it a much wider range ot ratios. The Engine is actually a 1.25 liter with 83 horses at 87 octane. More like mid-90's if you run premium petrol.

I suspect that the #4 cylinder issue stems from the placement of the PCV port close to or on the #4 intake port.

There are many used engines available with low miles from totaled cars in the 1,000 to 1,500 US range. http://www.car-part.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?userSearch=int&userPID=1000&userLocation=USA&userIMS=&userInterchange=B%3FFD&userSide=&userDate=2013&userDate2=2013&dbModel=15.59.1.1&userModel=Chevy%20Spark&dbPart=300.1&userPart=Engine&sessionID=200000000000000000740967411&userPreference=miles&userZip=25404&userLat=39.4616&userLong=-77.9695&userIntSelect=1513337&userUID=0&userBroker=&userPage=1&iKey= If you need o

These engines have a comp ration of 10.5 to 1 (and seriousluy detuned} so they must be made to very high standards in order to run safely on 87 oct. (That is of course unless they have an offset crank??? Hmm, that would be very cool! It also means that running high oct alone may give 5 to 10 more HP..... Too bad you can't run E85 with its 98 oct, may give you 100 HP!!!) Anyway,with full synth (DEXOS) oil there is very little carbon to deposit, maybe some silica which is harder (though mostly powder like fine sand) than carbon from usual engine oil deposits? (the major downside of syth oil)

These cars are FBW and as you may have noticed they don't engine brake, at least very well. If you dump the throttle at speed there's little difference between the decel with the clutch in or out. My guess is that the ECU maintains stoic matching the revs to some extent in order to help emmisions. The best way to reduce fuel consumption is to hold the clutch in or shift to neutral in manual trans cars. That lets the revs drop back to idle. Neither of my Sparks close the injectors completely on decel and I suppose it's because of the FBW lets the ECU overide gas pedal inputs.

I push the clutch in on long downhill stretches or approaching stops sometimes and on a 1/2 mile coast like that I watched the avg MPG climb at least .5 MPG. On the 13 mile commute home from work I can bump the AVG up 2 MPG sometimes.

Filled my manual Spark in MD for 2.99/gal and drove around for almost 2 hundred miles averaging over 50 MPG.(I reset the MPG average function at every fillup) That was mostly freeway and now back in WV it's settled back down to usual 44.

Appt, for our Spark number 2 is next Tues. It isn't using too much at this point. But, i'll feel much better when the new grey part is in there...

My boss had a late model BMW sedan and he had some ongoing issues with it... the passenger seat kept moving in the forward position on it's own and it kept draining the battery for a while and the AC had to be repaired 2 times as I recall. No warranty and the bills amounted to upwards of 5 to 8 grand in the 4 years he owned the car. Not to mention the fact that he couldn't drive it in the snow at all cause of the rear drive made it dangerous without chains or snow tires. The car looked impressive tho... He unloaded it and drives an Outback with the six now. BTW, he had to put premium in the

My wife and I each have one and we are near retirement age. We love these cars, both have 30k plus and we hope these will be the last cars we'll need to buy. I realy enjoy refilling the car on 20 bucks every few weeks! My coworker's new Fusion also has 30k on it and he's trying to find tires to replace the cheezy tires that Ford put on it that howl and vibrate so bad that he can't hear himself think. Our excellent Goodyear tires look like they have another 20k on the tread and are whisper quiet.

Mine did that once the day after I did the PCV recall and it appears that the ECU had a hiccup the following morning so the tranny was stuck in 2nd gear and lots of engine clatter. I just pulled over and restarted the engine and it's been fine ever since...2 weeks now. I suppose the tech left a step out of the ECU update procedure or something.... Remember, dealers have auto mechanics in the shop, not necessarily IT techs like myself. These new cars are all run by computers, so....

Sounds like you are doing all the right things, though I'd make a habit of monitoring oil levels at least every 1000 miles just to be safe. That goes for any car out there. GM is in the process of ramping up their safety standards and that means pulling lots of cars into dealers to fix stuff that the old GM was not addressing adequately. Which is good for us, but it may require that the dealers retrain their techs and managers to hone their troubleshooting skills while being swamped with recall jobs. I think maybe your PCV valve is failing and your lower MPG could very well be due to #4

Some 2015's were on hold pending a secondary hoodlatch replacement. May be a bit before they become available.

That could also be due to a ECU reset done by the dealer after a firmware update. The ECU may take some time to relearn the engine parameters. This happens whenever the battery is disconnected for servicing or replacing engine parts to prevent short circuits and stuff. ECU's may also crash on rare occasions and reboot themselves when you restart the engine. I say this because of the misfire and unrelated indic. lights flashing. The misfire may just be the ECU needs to hear from the knock sensor for the first time before it can start retarding the spark timing to where it needs to be. Usually i