Starting Issues

So I bought my Jimny brand new in December 2010. Since then I've been having a problem which I'll outline what happens below. The dealer are having problems identifying what's happening and although they are being helpful it's getting a little annoying.

It used to do this only when starting when very cold or wet but now does it randomly at any time.

Here's what happens:

-Turn the key to position 2 for a couple of seconds to let the ignition 'prime'
-Turn the key to start, at this point the car will either:

a) The engine fails to start within a reasonable period and/or requires depression of the accellerator to fire. The car then feels 'lumpy' until the throttle has been pressed a few times.

or

b) The engine fires 'OK' maybe a little slowly but then feels lumpy until cleared with the accellerator.

Other times the car starts ok but when you pull away for the first couple of times (eg off the drive, first turning at the end of the road) it feels lumpy and needs a bit more gas to get going.

When the car is at the garage, no fault codes are coming up. It's happened once in their presence and they've made some minor alterations but it's still doing it.

I love my car and I really don't want to give it back..... Can you help??

My friends had the same problem on his 2001 Jimny, turned out to be the auto choke, but his engine management light was on and once plugged into the computer the problem was identified.
But the symptoms you describe sound exactly the same.
No light on the dash on then?
Hope you get it sorted! J

No lights, no fault codes, no nothing.

It's going in tomorrow for a checkover. I might see if getting them to re-flash the ECU or whatever it is they do to them works.

I've decided there's no way I'm giving the Jimny back though, as there's literally no more!

I hope they give you a new jimny for the problems

No chance.... From what I've heard Jimnys ordered 6 months ago still haven't even been built!

What would be better is a price reduction enough to get the engine rebuilt.

You could try running the engine in pitch dark with the bonnet open to look for any stray HT tracking. It certainly sounds as if one or more plugs is fouling at start-up. Have you taken them out one by one to see if there's any contamination on them? Do this when it is running rough. My old dad used to call this "reading the plugs". Sorry if I'm stating something obvious that you have already done. Has this been happening literally since day one? Or did you do anything that might have caused the engine to get wet? An AA man told me that a massive problem with modern engines was that the voltage fed to the coil packs was very low - much less than the 12V from a good ole contact breaker set up. Therefore, any slight corrosion on a low tension terminal could cause a voltage drop that translates into a high tension voltage not quite big enough for a plug to fire in a cold engine. He claimed this corrosion often happened when a car was driven through water, causing a cloud of steam in the engine bay. The steam made its way past all the grommets and the like that are supposed to keep liquid water away from bullet connectors and so forth.
The same AA man gave me a great tip, not directly relevant to your situation. With carbed cars, if the engine flooded with petrol it used to be possible to clear the flood by opening the throttle and turning it over for a few spins. With injection systems, this doesn't work, but if you remove the fuel pump fuse and turn the engine over, then put it back in, it usually restarts first time.
I had a Scimitar SS1 that ran like a dog for over a month. Nothing I did, which included changing all plugs, leads, distributor cap, coil and fuel pump worked at all. It turned out that I had contaminated fuel.