Took my car out for a ride yesterday and ran it through the gears wide open and when I stopped the temp guage had dropped from the regular 180 to 130? It took about 3 minutes or so and than the temp went back up slowly to 180. I checked the coolant and engine, everything checked out ok. Car is running perfect, can someone give me an idea what this could be??

 

Never heard of the temp going down because of lack of coolant. I would check the sending unit sensor.

 

Hi, it also happens to me.

Just yesterday night, i´ve started the car... driving to the motorway not very hard. The temp was buliding, and when it reached the regular temp, i started to build some high speed (300km/h) and the temps lowerd suddently to half and then when up slowly. Checked the car, everything was ok.
I was just afraid i took my car to higher revs with the car still cold... but i just can´t tell if it can cause any damage.

It looks like the car builds heat, and when it reachs running temp, it opens the thermostat and the water starts to circulate through the radiators and the temperature goes down again.

If someone can correct me, please do!

 

Sounds like sending unit to me also..OR just a one off time,an act of God..LOL.

 

My car does this when it's full cold (and it's cold out)... it will get up to temp and then the first 1 or 2 runs in boost it will go back down a bit before going back up.

I always just assumed it was normal as the engine was sucking colder water at the front of the car from the radiators back to the engine until all the coolant had been passed through a few times?? Just figured that would happen considering the extra amount of distance the coolant has to travel to get to the engine compared to a normal car.

 

Something similar happened to my 03 Turbo.

I can't recall the exact details but it involved a long mostly downhill grade during which the car was coasting in gear under closed throttle.

At some point towards the bottom of a long downhill section I glanced down at the dash and noticed the coolant gage needle down from where it usually resides around the "180" hash mark.

The lower than usual reading had me a bit concerned but everything else was ok and the engine was running just fine.

I attribute the event to the engine cooling down some from the lack of running, well burning any fuel, and I suspect a temp gage that while heavily dampened around the "180" hash mark got into a region where it was not quite so dampened and the gage needle indicated a lower temp than the actual temp.

While I had an OBD2 code reader/data logger with me but was testing something else in the OBD2 port and didn't want to disconnect it to take an actual coolant temp reading but I suspect the coolant temp was not nearly as low as the gage suggested.

Might add this has only happened once in over 95K miles of driving and up and that same grade, on 58 highway on one or the other side of Tehachapi CA IIRC, but may have been coming down I-40 west of Flagstaff AZ.

 

So after reading ur issues guys , what happened to your temps now?