Car will not start

Hi Ken,

Here is the first video showing the vacuum hose off of the fuel pressure regulator and nothing coming out of the nipple and also shows fuel coming out of both the throttle body butterfly valve and boot hose. 2 mins 51 secs in total.

This next video shows just the throttle body and boot hose area with the ICV hose taken off. You can see all three in this shot. 2 mins 19 secs. Before doing any more work to figure out where this fuel is coming from I will wait for the endoscope to arrive.

By the way, you have added a very neat feature with this video upload now available.

Hi Ken,

If I understand you correctly, are you saying I am going to have to take the cylinder head off? Or is it just taking the intake manifold off? If it's just taking the intake manifold off, I can do that as I have already done that once.

Since I have VANOS it may be beyond me to take the cylinder head off with the tools I have. If this is what you would like me to do, I will wait for the endoscope to arrive. This way I can get into areas of the engine with it to see what is going on without having to take much of anything apart.

I suspect, as you do, that it is the ECM unit sending incorrect signals to the injectors and keeping them all open, as that is the only thing I can think of that is happening due to the large volume of fuel coming out at once.

As to the oil change, that was one of the things I was going to do anyway and have 6+ liters of Amsoil waiting to be put in! Plus Auto-RX and Prolong.

PS. The noise in the videos is the front electric fan going. My car has two fans - one running off of the engine and the other one is an electric one that comes on when the key is turned to the on, engine off, position and is in front of the radiator.

Ok Ken. I will do that sometime over the weekend.

Ok Ken. Here is the video.

As we suspected all the injectors are open when the key is turned to the on, engine off, position and gushing out fuel. A note about the injectors.... all the injector pintle caps either came off and went into the engine cylinders or got stuck in the inlet manifold which is why you can see the bare metal of the injector ends. Which means more work for me to find out where they went. This should not have happened and I will be contacting the seller of the injector refurbishment kit. Also, I missed showing number 4 but that too was spraying out fuel.

I suppose the good news is that the spray of all the injectors looks very good and consistent across the board! So apart from the pintle caps coming off they look as good as new!! ;)

I have found a place in Illinois where they will refurbish my ECM/ECU for $218 or do you have a better suggestion?

One thing about the injectors I forgot to mention.... the black grounding wire that bolts to the front of the engine (engine block VANOS area - 13mm socket head bolt) that comes from the wiring loom for the injectors was not attached to the vehicle (so that I could raise the injector rail up). Would this have mattered? Thinking about it I don't think that would have but wanted to check with you.

I have lost about 15 gallons of fuel without driving anywhere since filling up my tank back in July and figuring this out just now. Amazing!

Just a quick question as this is puzzling me.... is a failure like this normal? Can an ECU/ECM fail in such a way and cause such problems? Or can it be due to an electrical short? I keep thinking about how this problem first started - it was raining very heavily and have been wondering if this somehow caused an electrical short to occur on the chassis somewhere and caused this problem.

Studying up a bit more on this here is a forum thread that talks about this issue that someone had on their car - it seemed to be a ground fault. Not sure where I would start with this on my car though. Here is the forum link: http://forums.nicoclub.com/injectors-spray-all-the-same-time-t553320.html

Correction - 15 litres was lost not 15 gallons.

Hi Ken,

I tested each injector individually and each one by itself opened when the key was turned to the on, engine off, position, spurting more fuel out - just like before. I didn't bother testing the injectors electrically. I removed the ECU/DME and just prior to packing it up to ship to be repaired in Illinois I opened the unit up. I found some water damage on the bottom of the unit as can be seen in the pics below.

The first image is the inside of the bottom casing. The second image is the staining that has occurred on the plastic that sits between the casing and the circuit board. The third image shows the water damage to the circuit board which can be seen at the bottom of the image where there is white stuff on it.

There was probably a short of some sort and has blown one of the transistors in this area. The other side of this circuit board is where a lot of the chips are situated for this unit.

All this fits with the information I came across about what happens to this model of BMW when it rains very heavily. When rainfall is exceptionally heavy water gets into the computer compartment due to the drainage system (the lip) around the hood area not being high enough with the result that too much water flow can overwhelm the drainage system and enter the engine compartment, usually making its way to the computer compartment first. This is a known fault/problem by BMW. I will have to ring them up and find out if there is something they can do about it as I read that there is a kit that they can install.

And remember I mentioned way back in my first post that this problem occurred after a very heavy rainfall. By the time I came across this info and looked inside the computer compartment the water had evaporated (it did happen after all at the beginning of summer back in May)!

Hi Ken, I got an email today (26th Sept) saying that you had posted a response. There seems to be something wrong with the pages as the last post I can see is from the 17th September. This means that the post and pictures I put up about the DME/ECU is not able to be seen by me either (and I am logged in). Also most of the videos have disappeared and the only one left is the one from the 17th September. Can you correct this and let me know when it is fixed so I can see what you wrote?

Hi Ken, Thanks for that. I did try re-connecting the ground wire and that didn't help. I sent off the unit and, yes, they rebuild it, replacing any transistors that have gone bad and reflashing the system OS.

Hi Ken, I just got bad news from the repair place. They said it was so badly water damaged that they couldn't fix it. So I am looking at getting a new one that may set me back up to CDN$1700!