Sometimes it can be difficult to pin down exactly what’s going wrong with a car. A friend of mine is a mechanic and someone recently had their car bump started and took it in for him to take a look at. The weird thing? Once it got there, it started up every time following about 25 starts and what seemed like a lot of diagnostic tests.
My friend was as baffled as the owner as to what the trouble could have been, given that the car was given a full multi-point inspection and passed every test including the laptop diagnostics.
The moral of the story? Sometimes your car may just have an intermittent problem. No matter what is done, you may find that it just won’t start for a day, prior to it suddenly working again. This is probably ‘Alfa’ syndrome.
The difference being, if you do own an older Alfa Romeo (their newer cars are actually quite solidly built), it’s more than likely you will have experienced this more than once. However, think of it as the ‘character’ of the car. Following service intervals and regularly checking your motor over should help to avoid ‘Alfa’ syndrome but it isn’t guaranteed as this case in point shows.
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