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I noticed that after putting my foot down I get a little cloud of white smoke coming out similar to what you would get on a cold winter day. This doesn't happen when I drive with my foot barely on the accelerator, but when I put it quite reasonably down, the smoke comes out. Has anyone experienced this?

Is it all the time, or from cold or when warmed up etc?

I have noticed a bit of white smoke from mine when its cold, generally regardless of the ambient temperature.

I would call it fairly cold, i.e. first 5/10 minutes of driving

Yeah that's typically when I get it, but not everytime.

got a different exhaust? white smoke when cold is likely to be condensation in your system, and the throttle pushes a bit of it out the back, where it changes to steam.

when it's warm it's more likely to be water getting into the exhaust when it shouldn't - i.e head gasket problems....

Today it got really bad when I started the engine up, then on the way back home, the exhaust emission light came on. Does anyone know what the problem might be?

how far was that journey? do you make long journeys short journeys?

Very short journeys most of the time. This one was about 1 or 2 miles in when it came on, about 60 seconds later it came off.

it mite be because the car isnt being able to Fully heat up, i had a similar problem, in my breather pipes was white gunge(no wasnt the headgasket) but i do short journeys about 7 miles then 7mile back, then thats it could be something to do with that max?

It might be, because as soon as the light came off the engine temperature jumped up from like 85 to 90.

I had a very simmilar problem, the solution is to take it on a nice long run till it's nicely warmed up and then give it a good thrash!!!

Trust me it's the best way to clean out all the crap that builds up in the engine!!!

stick some injector cleaner in it aswell, also get some throttle body cleaner

J-GTi wrote:I had a very simmilar problem, the solution is to take it on a nice long run till it's nicely warmed up and then give it a good thrash!!!

Trust me it's the best way to clean out all the crap that builds up in the engine!!!

I might try to do that today, but what if it all goes wrong?

I've just thought about it, and this only started happening as last week I had no money to fill up the car so had to run it into the red a little bit. That might be the reason why all the dirt is in the engine. Ok went up and gave it a proper thrash for a good hour and a half, seems that the smoke has reduced quite significantly but hasn't gone altogether.