[Adrian E]

Originally Posted by ainarssems

What's the mileage on yours Adrian? IIRC it fairly low so wondering why it has disintegrated.
Mine is 19 years old now, 142k miles, I have had it for last 8.5 years and as far as I know cats have never been replaced. Emissions have steadily improved over the years I have owned it. MOT test limits are 0.3% CO and 200ppm for fast idle and 0.5% CO for natural idle. It started with something like 0.01 % CO and about 30 ppm of HC, last 2 MOT's it was doing 0.00 CO in both fast idle and natural idle and HC was just 8ppm at fast idle.

Maybe PF cats were better made then cost saving cut in for PF so might be an idea to fit second hand PF cats if they fit physically, of course you would need to find a way to fit after cat lambdas as PF never had any.

Hiya

Just passed 70k miles within the last couple of weeks, so yes very low for the age.

Cats failing is usually down to thermal shock or physical impacts, so either driving through flood water, or having a mechanic belt something too hard with a hammer could be enough to damage one. The nearside one is perfect still, but that's the one that failed on Andrew's....

The other possibility is engine related issues poisoning the cat. When the plugs were done very recently it turns out I'd been driving around for the last 5 years with 1 plug loose. That might've been enough to cause the cat to fail.

The problem for us is that the AVP and one other engine code fitted in the last 18 months of production are different to even earlier facelift cars. They are tucked in pretty tight, but without seeing ones for other engine codes from a facelift it's difficult to know if they could be made to fit.

Manufacturers have got wise to the problems caused by having cats under the car - they're now close-coupled to the manifolds because they avoid thermal shock up there, plus they light off more quickly too.

MOT testers aren't known for doing all they should with emissions testing - in theory with dual exhaust they should test both and take an average. I've never seen it done! My wife's car has 4 tailpipes (all connected to something, unlike Golf Rs!) and they definitely didn't on that!