I've had this car since 90K miles (since 1995) and now it has 315K and I LOVE IT. Am 2nd owner. Actually, I drove it for about 40K before my wife took it over and now she loves it. It's had all it's scheduled maintenance religiously done since new.

For the last 10 years it's had a very intermittent turbo "cutting out" problem. The turbo will work great for weeks on end, then all of a sudden in the middle of a trip, it just doesn't kick in when you mash the pedal. Let it sit and cool and it works again. Sometimes it'll work for 30 minutes before cutting out again, and sometimes it'll work for 3 months without cutting out again. We've lived with this problem after spending $2.5K to track this down about 5 years ago at the dealership while they replaced everything including the ECU. It worked just long enough (a few months) that when the problem happened again, I didn't bother taking it back. They had a helluva time even reproducing the problem until I let the service manager commute in it for a week.

Now I'm writing this post because my wife reports that it now does it on almost any trip over 30 minutes and sometimes even on shorter trips. Bless her she says she can still drive it without the turbo just that's it's "annoying." (It would drive me nuts!).

One thing I've noticed about this problem over the years, that might be a clue, is that the car has always run like crap at high altitude. Wouldn't even start at 6000 ft. outside Las Vegas one time and had it towed down to 3000 feet where it started, but belched white smoke. At 3000-4000 feet it always starts rough and belches some white smoke for the first little while until warmed up. And, the turbo always goes out at high altitude and stays out, even when it cools off. When we used to drive it from Dallas to go skiing in New Mexico, the turbo has always gone out on the highway about half-way there, or at about 3000 feet altitude. We just don't take the car on road trips anymore and keep the car at 500 ft. altitude (Dallas) which is ok for a daily driver. I don't know how this altitude issue may related to the intermittent turbo, but it is worse at high altitude.

It'd be nice to get this resolved once and for all. I read a number of posts here about banjo bolts, ALDA's (is that like in "Alan?"), wastegate controllers, switchover valves, and various lines clogged with oil and/or soot. However most of these threads seem to relate to either total permanent loss of boost or reduced boost. My car works perfectly great most of the time and then mysteriously looses all boost in the middle driving for no apparent reason. My local mechanic who is otherwise awesome and has maintained this car the last 225K miles has not been able find the problem.

Oh, and we had the turbo replaced completely at 280K miles after it went out from my wife overheating the car with low coolant (no other damage, though).

Since this is purely intermittent and seems to happen when the car has been running awhile, is there something in particular I should be looking for? I was thinking that one of the oil lines to the turbo might be partially clogged causing an overheat shutdown of the turbo, but I'm just guessing.

Did I mention we love this car? We could buy something else, but see no reason why just yet.