6 months ago I purchased an 06 WRX and have been quite happy with it. The only thing is the idle. It has a definite miss fire or something that makes it rough. Its not terrible and the dealership claims that Subaru thinks its normal for a turbo engine. Does this make sense. It sort of does when they explain it. It can run for about 10 seconds at a time with no change in tempo and then it shakes and smoothes out again. Everything else seems normal though. It has lots of power and never stalls or anything like that.
My 03 does the same thing ever since i had it. The tach stays steady, may be something else that causes the shaking. Wouldnt the tach dip some if it was misfiring ?
My 02 WRX wagon idles roughly too, always has. Car vibrates a little. When the AC compressor kicks in it gives a little stumble (try turning off the AC and make sure the vents are not set to defrost -it turns on the AC 'secretly'. I don't know how bad yours is, but to a certain degree they all do that. Smooth idling inline 4 Hondas they are not.
Unless it's really horrible, I wouldn't worry. Think of it as character !
There will, no doubt be tons of stuff about this on NASIOC.com.
I've got an '03 WRX Wagon and will get this every now and again first thing in the morning.
I've always interpreted it as the 'boxer' being slightly out of sync. (ie: how the boxer engine pistons work) Which gets properly sync'd up with a bit of time. (ie: engine warms up)
I may be totally off base - but that's aways how it felt to me.
I got a 04 wrx and a 05 LGT The idle shake you feel is ABSOLUTELY NORMAL AND TO BE EXPECTED with the turbos, both my cars have it and this is a very well documented engine characteristic. You dealer is right on this one. The reason for this is that the Subaru boxer engine has no balance shafts like some other 4 cylinder cars ( ie: Hondas ) the advantage to this is it makes for lighter engines, the main disadvantage is the introduction of the secondary undampened vibartions you feel.
**You must, because my 05 Impreza RS does it and my bro-in-law's STi used to do it also. On my first oil change, I asked about it and the service guy said that it was normal. For me, it's more prevalent when I've just started it than when it's warmed up.
I think you are mixing up two different things. The Subaru engines do indeed vibrate a bit more than a counterbalanced engine, but that's a constant, and nothing to do with a "hiccup" in the idle that occurs every so often, per the OP's description.
I've heard too many WRX engines that were very smooth at idle. I'm talking about a fully warm engine that is not gummed up by continuous stop & go driving. If after a decent highway run of 15 minutes or so at 60+ the idle should be very smooth.
both my cars hiccup all the time at idle, it's a suby ( undocumented ) trait. Go to nasioc.com or legacygt.com for more info. Don't fret about this, you will never get the smoothness of a Honda balanced engine but who gives a damn, just read this and be happy:
It must be a bonus feature to make up for all the squeaking, creaking, and general annoying noise-making characteristics of my car's interior.
After many many hours of work, the only noise is some creaking when the dash and the instrument bezel temperatures don't match (ie, coming out of the garage and warming up in the sun). But man did I spend a lot of time irritated at my car, the shop, and life in general.
That's interesting. My '04 STi doesn't do anything like that - it starts and runs very smoothly, even starting from cold after a couple of weeks of no use, both idling and while driving. The only time I can think of when it hasn't is when it had a few weeks of disuse and for the first mile or two it felt like there was a slight misfire or something, but then it returned to normal. There's sometimes a small change in idle speed while it idles, but that's about it.
**Ha! Then my car's a mutant because I find the inside of mine extremely quiet. Of course, my previous car was a 2003 VW Jetta. It had one of the noisest interiors compared to my other previous cars. The Impreza only has about 5,500 miles on it so perhaps it will get more noisy in the future.
**I used to counter that in the Jetta with a copious amount of loud CD playing. Sadly, the CD player in the Impreza is poop compared to the Monsoon system in the Jetta.
Have you ever had problems with your CD player? Mine plays fine for driving around home though the CDs do come out of the player really hot. But when I drive more than an hour or two, the CD player stops playing CDs and the CDs practically burn your hand when you kick 'em back out of the player. It will also refuse to load CDs from time to time no matter what the circumstance. I went to the dealership over this and they drove it three whole miles and gave me the can't replicate line. It doesn't change the fact that this has happened to me without fail everytime I drive a significant distance. I've driven from MI to CT and back again 4 times with this car and the CD player has failed everytime. Upstate NY is ecumenical stations, country music stations and one classic rock station, do you know what that does to a person's mind? :)
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