I had been noticing some rich/oil smell in the exhaust on my 3.0 lately, and the idle got rough over the past week. I pulled the plugs and they were literally covered in oil on the backside and burnt oil covered the tips.

I finally got p0300 and a variety of single cylinder misfire codes on startup/ first idle (p1345, p1350, etc). After the plug swap, I still got the codes and it nearly died on idle, but I gave it some gas and it started running ok.

Letting the motor get up to temp, I drove it around for a while. I cleared the codes and the SES did not come back, nor did the codes or misfires. It felt a bit more torquey in 4th and 5th.

My guess is the VCG that seals the plug tubes are leaking like a sieve, and that eventually killed my idle and caused misfires and that if I change those, my idle will clear up as I will have less oil on the plugs.

I checked every thread that had p1345 in it because that was the first code I got. Some people were dealing with cam sensors and trying to diagnose coils going dead, but I don't think I have those issues.

Would anyone disagree?

Fortunately VGCs are cheap so the test of my theory is low cost.

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2001 E53 3.0 5pd