Today we’re going to be going over the symptoms of bad ignition coils on a VW and Audi 2.0T engine. Here we have our ignition coils. Common issues relating to these ignition coils would be misfire faults and random misfires that would be on either all cylinders or on a specific cylinder.
One way you can test ignition coil failure is if you have a scan tool and you’re looking at it, you can take one coil and swap it to a different cylinder and see if that misfire moves.
Let’s say you have a misfire under cylinder one, you can move that coil to cylinder two and if you swap them and it moves, now you know that your coil is the problem. Other issues related to this when your vehicle is running rough you’ll have a check engine light flashing and/or your engine might be bucking real hard. If you pop the hood you might see it shaking a bunch and other symptoms like that. Here we have a few different coils that are options.
This was the original coil that came in 2 liter turbo engines, as you see here it has no sheathing on the bottom. This particular one is the upgraded coil that VW has changed to for 2.0T engines. This one is no longer the one that dealers or anyone’s supposed to be using and now this particular one with the sheathing is the one that people install.
Now, these are the Audi R8 ignition coils which are a pretty popular install for the 2.0T engine as well. An additional note related to the Audi R8 ignition coils is going to be: these specific coils are a more visual upgrade, that it is a very popular upgrade in the enthusiast community. There are some talks about them being hotter spark or perform a little better. We have never seen any claims, any proof that that’s true but it is widely debated. .