The car in question is a ~15year old Opel Corsa C: The engine starts immediately, without any problems. After 2-5 seconds of running the engine just cuts off. There is a blinking CEL, but my reader claims there are no trouble codes set.
Performed checks / noticed symptoms:
- The fuel pump seems to be running, as I hear it. At the moment I do not have the means to measure the fuel pressure.
- As a test I detached the air intake pipe from the throttle body, nothing changed.
- I could observe the throttle valve moving. I cannot tell if the movement is consistent with normal behavior.
- I could not check the spark plugs yet. I suspect that they won't be faulty as the engine is clearly running after startup.
- After the starting attempts there is a smell of fuel present in the air. I could not detect any visual leaks.
- Pressing the accelerator does not prevent the cut-off.
- Despite not pressing the accelerator, immediately after starting I could observe the RPM to rise to 2K when the engine cut off.
Some observations about the car:
- One oxygen sensor got replaced a year ago.
- The car was sitting for 10 days in the garage, so I want to exclude cable damages by martens.
- The fuel filter was never replaced, as the car has only ~50KKM it won't be my primary suspect.
- There were no repairs or other meddling with the engine in the last year.
- There are no visible damages to cables, engine or other things.
Could somebody suggest me other checks to perform (Besides getting a better code reader)?
Edit:
The blinking CEL, according to the user manual, is the indicator for an engaged immobilizer. Switching keys did help. It was helpful to detach the battery temporarily, the engine started afterwards. It is however no permanent fix as a second start still results in the immobilizer deactivating the engine.