Burnt Match Smell
I have a 2013 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport LE. I bought it in 2017 with 31,000 miles. After a week or so I noticed a strong rotten egg or sulfur smell when I would press the gas hard, smells like striking a match and immediately blowing it out. I also noticed that it seemed like it has a hard time accelerating from 20 to 40 mph, like it would shift to a higher gear too soon, and I have to give it about 3/4 throttle before it will downshift a gear. So basically it feels like a complete loss of power between 20 to 40mph unless I force a downshift. Then I also noticed that I was only getting an average of about 18 mpg in the city and 23 mpg on the highway even though the specs call for 27 city 31 highway. Now fast forward and the sulfur smell is much worse, I sometimes smell it even when I don’t accelerate hard. Note that I do only smell it when the driver window is down. Gas mileage is still the same. Acceleration issue seems to be slightly worse. No service engine lights on at all or any history in the obd2. I’ve had the $200 engine clean treatment done by valvoline, I’ve used at least 5 different kinds of engine cleaner products from Autozone that you put in your gas tank, including CataClean. The car drives great while the stuff is in the tank, but as soon as I refuel it’s back to degraded performance. When I step on the gas though it really gets up and goes. Sometimes when I get out after driving I smell burnt rubber, the smell like when someone powerbrakes. The recommended octane is 87 and I’ve tried all octanes, no difference. For the past 4 months I’ve been using ethanol free 87/89 octane fuel only. At first it seemed to help but not now. I cannot make the car produce this smell when it’s parked, even if I rev the engine while in gear with the brakes on. It’s under warranty with only 41k miles on it now and the dealer says they don’t see any of the issues I’m pointing out but that’s because they don’t want to fix the car for free under warranty. Can someone help me troubleshoot this myself so I can just have a normal running vehicle like I intended when I bought it? It is the cvt 2 wheel drive version.
