Tempreture Guage dropped and loss of power

[henzero]

Hi Guys, before i posted i did search before posting but only found a few temperature gauge dropping topics.

Golf mk4 1.6 2002 Model

What happened:
Drove about 25minutes to fetch a wedding dress, stopped, left car for 30minutes, tempreture outside is around 12-14degrees C.

Car started first time, but felt sluggish, at first thought nothing of it, but 2 minutes down the road notice temp gauge dropped down to almost 0, at this point started smelling something strange (almost the same smell fire crackers give) car is really pulling slow, no power at all, temp gauge went up but not over 90 but dropped again.

When pulling away car stutters and almost feel like it's missfiring.

any ideas?

PS. we are getting married on sunday, and then leaving on honeymoon, hope it's not something huge or expensive

[volks18]

Hi

Had the same problem with my mk4 over the last few days did you find the cause

[sps]

sounds like a faulty engine coolant temperature sensor.

but best bet would be to get the fault codes checked first.

[mkman1]

That the first thing I would change. I had a problem where the engine temperature would go upto 90 deg Cent and then go all the way to zero ,on the dashboard temp display. Then little bit later would would move back up to 90 deg Cent. Put a new one in and it fixed the problem.