Can anyone tell me what temperature their cars run at? Mine seems constant at 80C and never goes up much past that. The centre of the gauge is at 90C and all my previous cars have always had the temp needel in the middle when warmed up properly.
Cheers
Ben
The temperature gauge is not accurate enough to take these figures too seriously. 80C would be a fair temperature. What is important is that:
1) the needle moves off the starting point (i.e. it works) and2) whenever it the needle starts to go up (when crawling in a jam, for example) it stops at some point when the thermostat turns the fan on and then eventually comes back down again.
My car, for example, ran with the needle usually just below the end of the blue zone until I replaced the temperature sensor. Now it runs with the needle just above the end of the blue zone. It had a water leak for a time and when the needle started heading for the red zone without any sign of stopping, I pulled over, allowed the engine to cool, then filled it up with water. Later I fixed the leak. A mobile tuning guy once told me the true temperature which was about 10C different from the gauge.
Where, exactly, the needle is isn't the important bit - that it isn't in either the red or blue is more important.
However, 80°C is a reasonable temperature.
Our 306 1.8 Auto is the same.
Our 306 1.4 sat at about 80 after flushing and replacing the coolant (and I was sure it sat more at 90 before that). After a month or so it went back to the 90 mark and that's about the max it gets to now. So I'd say it sounds okay.
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