Any help with this would be hugely appreciated. My civic recently died after a short trip, the car drove perfect that day and gave no sign of any underlying problems. I went back to my car to drive home. The car started but idled very rough and when i touched the accelerator it dies. I ended up having it towed to a garage in town. I was told it was my idle air control vale that was causing the problem. This part new is €340 and i cannot find it second hand.They told me that they tried cleaning it but no luck. I got the part off them and brought it to a friend and we had a go cleaning it ( carburetor cleaner ) i also read that if i test the terminals it should read between 8-15 ohms and mine reads 11.5 ohms. my friend is sure that its not faulty. Any ideas what else could be the problem?

 

garage also told me my spark plugs were shot. But the car was only serviced 2-3 months ago and the plugs were changed. I am really not sure about anything they are telling me

 

The IACV controls idling, it doesn't affect driving. So I really doubt that is it.

A sudden (instantaneous) loss of performance can be caused by the timing belt skipping teeth putting the engine out of time. So the timing should be checked.

Bad spark wires can do this too, but they typically don't go bad instantly. If it has MPFI, idle the engine and disconnect the fuel injectors one at a time to see if there's one dead cylinder.

 

quiet pissed off now to think that they would let me go ahead and buy a part for €340 that i don't actually need. I'll get them to check the timing belt. Its a b16a2 engine they told me they ran diagnostics on it and the iacv showed up surely they would have looked at the timing belt as well?