Information about the car:
The car is a 2006 Outback with EJ253 and automatic transmission. 130 thousand miles. Did head gaskets, timing belt, spark plugs, pcv, VVT solenoids and more at about 115k miles. The idle has had a very slight smoothing at stoplights, but otherwise seems to run fine. I change the oil and filter every 5k miles but the oil pan leaks so I end up adding 1/2 qt each tank of gas on top of that. All fluid levels are normal at this time.
Ok, about the situation:
My wife drove my car the other day on her way to work and made it about 3 miles from home before the Christmas tree came full on it. See the image below for the lights that were on when the problem occurred. She said the brakes went limp, the steering stiffened and the engine died (all probably due to the engine dying) and then there was a serious loss of power once she was able to restart it.
After I got there to look at the car about 15 minutes later, I started it up and it was running extremely rough, and was clearly only running on one or maybe two cylinders. I put an OBDII reader on it and got the following codes:
P0301 – Cylinder 1 failure
P0303 – Cylinder 3 failure
P0304 – Cylinder 4 failure
What I’ve checked so far:
Now that the car is in my garage I’ve been looking through the service manual to see what it suggests to check and I’ve seen a few threads here trying to figure it out as well. My findings so far:
- Checked ignition coil and got 10 kOhm on 1-2 and 3-4
- Checked for any oil around the spark plugs and is completely dry.
- Checked the spark plug wires and got 11kOhms across leads 3 & 4 and 6kOhms at 1 & 2 (because they are shorter?)
- I went to the ECM to start the injector voltage check, but I can’t figure out which connector on the ECM it should check (advice appreciated).
I saw someone say they replaced the PCV valve and it fixed this exact combination of DTCs, but thought I’d check here and see if anyone else has any other recommendations to check before I do. Appreciate all the help I can get.
I also noticed oil on this hose and the other connector right next to the PCV hose. See the arrows in red.
