P0300 Code with Flashing CEL

[AveoNewb]

Do be honest, I don't remember for sure. I do remember that it had broken up by that point and had burned plastic wear marks down the centre of the pulley. I am assuming this is from the drag on the belt as the bearings were seizing until the pulley finally exploded.

I would say the stalling is the warning. While the root cause is technically a misfire, I think a layman would recognize it as the engine just stopped running. I definitely didn't think of a misfire when it happened to me and there was no CEL or P0300 after the stall. I was driving down the road at 100 km/h and the engine just stopped. This happened 6 times over about 1,000 km of driving before the pulley finally gave up. The vehicle was brought to 2 different mechanics a total of 4 times and the problem could not be duplicated. That is when they diagnosed it as an ECM going south.

Edited to add: The CEL and P0300 started after the second stall incident; after I replaced the ECM. This sent me down the P0300 rabbit hole which lead me to delay the timing belt replacement, which in turn lead to the pulley exploding.

[avguy]

Certainly an ineresting adventure you've had there. But that's easy for me to say, and you obviously would have just as soon skipped the whole thing. One final question - had the belt and 3 other components been changed once previously around the recommended interval? (Don't know about Canada, but in the US it's 60K miles ~ 100K KM)

[AveoNewb]

Sorry for the delay in responding. I just completed a 2,500 km road trip with the Aveo and I was not online very often.

Glad to say that everything went well and the CEL light stayed off. The mileage seemed pretty good too. Haven't crunched the final numbers, but it looked around 7.8 L/ 100 km.

Yes, the components were all replaced at around 91,000 km.