Haynes' World is a regular feature that takes a look at what the staff at Haynes are doing with their cars, bikes and other vehicles. This time, Euan wonders if a petrol engine was the right choice for his Skoda Yeti.
Owner: Euan Doig
Did I choose the right engine?
I love my Skoda Yeti.
It’s a proper Swiss army knife of a car, because it has the ability to work in any given situation. It’s even served as a cooking area (see above), and with the winter tyres I put on it last winter (see below), it was unstoppable here in the UK.
However, I can’t shake an annoying feeling I might have bought the wrong one. You see, when I was looking for a car to replace my Honda CR-Z (which got written off while parked outside my house), I decided that I wasn’t going to be doing enough kms to make a diesel pay for itself, so I bought a Yeti TSI, with the 1.4-litre turbo petrol engine. Ace.
It’s a sweet motor that offers an ideal mixture of performance and economy for the lower-mileage user. And the car had just 43,000 km on it when I bought it. Great.
Would diesel have been a better choice?
But then life changed, because elderly relatives became seemingly intent on falling over and injuring themselves.
This went way beyond mere attention seeking (I’m kidding), but necessitated frequent jaunts north to the homeland of heather and haggis.
So, in just 18 months, it has now covered 87,000km. Oof. This is why I now suspect that a diesel might have been the more economical choice – and that’s before we get to the cost of changing the oil every 8000km. I do this in a bid to keep the engine as healthy as possible, but I’m starting to wonder if all the effort has been in vain.
Odd noises from the engine
You see, my car’s engine is the CAXA engine, and it’s started to make a weird whirring noise when cold. This noise doesn’t happen at idle, and only appears when I’m accelerating, and then it disappears once the oil is fully warmed up.
I can’t figure out what it could be. I’m worried that it could be the timing chain or tensioner. Could it be a camshaft issue? Or, as Haynes’ guru Martynn Randall suggested in this blog about his Z4, could it be tappets?
One thing’s for sure, I’m going to have to do some investigating, so here’s hoping the rain stays off for a bit.
