2004 Echo - Hesitation during acceleration

[birchy]

Hey all!

2004 Echo with 247,000km's. Noticed recently that it has a bit of a hesitation when accelerating.. that gets more noticeable the harder I accelerate. It feels like it's losing power, regaining power, losing power again. Just bought the Echo this past summer and it has a complete maintenance history that came with it - every 8000km's for the entire life of the vehicle. It's currently due for an oil change (just picked up the oil tonight actually). Air filter was good last time I checked a couple months ago.

Any ideas? Plugs and wires maybe? Fuel pump? Just looking through the maintenance receipts and it looks like the spark plugs were last done in 2007 at 143,000km's..

[ericlp]

Things that could be the problem.

Dirty Air filter, Clogged fuel filter, Plugs, Dirty injectors.

I've never check the fuel filter in my echo, but since you say you checked the air filter and was changed... I'd take a look at the plugs and change them out and dump a fuel injector cleaner in the tank and see if that doesn't help out your situation.

I heard that these echo's don't have changeable plug wires.

I think you need to remove the fuel pump to get to the fuel filter? Doesn't sound like a great design from Toyota. A fuel pump could cause what you are describing. I'd change the least expensive (general maintenance) first before swamping out expensive parts.

[SpaceSputnik]

I'd clean the throttle body for a good measure. It's really easy to do.

Also you may think about getting some form of OBDII scanner for further diagnostics. For instance a bluetooth adapter (ELM327) that you can use either with a laptop or an android phone (maybe an iphone too, not too sure).
ELM327 is under 30$ shipped on eBay.