Extremely high idle rev on 1.4 Meridian

[Pughawk]

Hey guys,

I experienced a one-off idle rev problem the other evening and I haven't found anything on here so far that seems to match the problem, and I just wanted to run it by you as it was pretty weird. It was freezing outside, though I initially started the car fine, normal RPM etc, although the ABS light didn't come off, so I turned it back off and on again, and this time the revs were through the roof, maybe 3500-4000, as if my foot was just on the accelerator. I turned it off and on a couple of more times and had the same problem. I was really so not in a good place to be breaking down, so I just sort of worked with it, reversed out of where I had been parked, controlling these extremely high revs, and then stop/started another two times, and the second time, it started absolutely fine. I then drove it some 70 miles via three other stops and experienced no problems, I have just tried it now and all seems fine. I know idle revs go up in the cold but this seems to have been a one-off and went away as quickly as it came. For what it's worth however, each time I started as the RPMs shot up, I pretty much turned it off after only a couple of seconds and didn't let it sit to see of it would go down itself.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,
Harry.

[Mighty306]

Most likely idle control valve (stepper motor) playing up.  Could have been sticking accelerator pedal/throttle cable I suppose but that doesn't really fit with your description of events.

Just had a look on Servicebox & there were quite a few iterations of the 1.4 engine so can't say for sure what part number you'd require if you find it happens again.

[Pughawk]

Most likely idle control valve (stepper motor) playing up.  Could have been sticking accelerator pedal/throttle cable I suppose but that doesn't really fit with your description of events.

Just had a look on Servicebox & there were quite a few iterations of the 1.4 engine so can't say for sure what part number you'd require if you find it happens again.

Thanks for your response, hopefully it'll be a one-off kind of thing

[Nexus]

This could be completely unrelated but just throwing in a similar experience. I used to have the same issue with my Automatic, during warm up the revs would sometimes climb up to 3000k for no apparent reason. Seeing as I'm driving an Automatic, the car would try and run away!

As described above it might be something to do with the Idle control valve, especially while the car is warming up. Cars will tick over at about 1100k revs for a couple of minutes at start up then settle down at about 800. So what did I do about the situation? Well I didn't actually find out however I did have replace my battery terminal lead with a brand new one and bizarrely fixed the issue of the revs going crazy. Maybe a voltage or earth problem I don't know.

Absolutely nothing to do with the ICV but hey, for some reason it settled down.