My daughter recently bought a ’60 Reg’ (Sep ’2010) 1.2i Petrol Vauxhall Corsa Exclusiv 5dr from a car supermarket. Whilst generally happy with the car it has an intermittent fault which when happens makes the car virtually impossible to drive. This has happened some 10-12 times over the last 2 months and seems to be occurring more often now that the colder weather has arrived.

When it does happen it is always on the first drive of the day (having been parked up overnight) and manifests itself by the ‘Service vehicle soon’ light coming on which in turn causes the engine to dramatically lose power (or vice versa) resulting in it having to be driven in much lower gears than normal. Strangely if the car is left parked up for a couple of hours the problem rectifies itself and then drives normally for the rest of the day.

When this problem first arose we thought it might be a servicing issue so had the car fully serviced by the local Vauxhall dealer. They also checked the on-board diagnostics to see if anything had been reported but no error code was present.

Can anyone help pinpoint the problem?