I have a 2001 A4 1.8T Avant. The previous owner claims to have replaced the coil packs.

I was driving home from work, and about halfway along my freeway journey, the car started bucking under any load, with the CEL was flashing. It would drive fine if I was maintaining speed or slightly slowing down, but any load would cause it to misfire. It was actually hard to keep the car at 60mph, but I limped it home in the slow lane. I scanned it with VAG COM when I got home and retrieved:

P0300

P0302

P0304

It seems a bit weird that two coil packs would go back at the same time. Maybe a hose is disconnected? What are some other things I can check besides spark plugs and coil packs? I tried driving the car around the block, and it will misfire in first gear at 5mph if I give it more than the smallest bit of throttle.

Thanks for any ideas

 

Wow that sounds really sensitive. For now, put some new plugs in and gap them to .028 and see what happens. You also can't trust everyone these days when they say they've replaced something.

 

Easy check on the coil packs, switch 2 and 4 to 1 and 3, reset the CEL, drive, misfire, scan for codes. If they switched to cyl 1 and 3, you know it's the coil packs.

Change the plugs, too. They're not too expensive and these little 1.8T's eat them like candy.

 

It looks like it was indeed the coil packs. The previous owner only replaced one of the four, and two of the old ones were causing the issues. Thanks for the tips!

 

Cool. I bet you're happy now. I sure was when I figured out why my car was misfiring.