P2D2E: Cold Start Intake Manifold Runner Performance Bank 2
What to do
The car drives normally once warm — this affects the first minute or two after a cold start.
Your engine changes how air enters the cylinders while it is warming up, to burn fuel more completely and get the catalytic converter hot quickly. That mechanism is not moving as commanded, so the engine may idle a little rough when cold and will produce more pollution than it should.
The usual cause is carbon build-up jamming the flaps, especially on a direct-injection engine. Cleaning is often the repair rather than replacement, and it is worth asking about first.
This will fail an emissions test even though nothing feels wrong, so deal with it before one is due.
Short journeys make it worse. If most of your driving is a few miles at a time, the engine rarely gets hot enough to burn deposits off — an occasional longer run at speed genuinely helps.
What this code means
The intake manifold runners are not performing as commanded during cold start on bank 2.
Cold start is when a petrol engine produces most of a journey's pollution, and this code belongs to the strategy that exists to fix that.
A catalytic converter does almost nothing until it is hot. For the first minute or so after a cold start it is effectively not there, so everything the engine emits in that window goes straight out — which is why emissions regulation focuses on it and why engines have a dedicated cold-start strategy.
Intake manifold runners are part of that strategy. Variable-length or valved runners change how air swirls into the cylinder; during warm-up they are commanded to promote turbulence, which mixes fuel better, burns it more completely, and — crucially — pushes more heat into the exhaust to light the catalyst sooner.
So a performance fault here does not stop the car. It costs the engine its fast catalyst warm-up: more emissions in the first minutes, a slightly rougher cold idle, and an emissions test failure long before the driver notices anything.
Carbon is the dominant cause, particularly on direct-injection engines where no fuel washes the intake ports. Runner flaps seize in soot deposits, and the actuator reports a movement that did not happen. The bank number says which side, and both banks together points at the actuator's shared control or vacuum supply rather than at the flaps.
Why this page exists when its neighbours do not. Nothing in the public web documents this block — four independent searches established that on 2026-08-10. This code is written because a manufacturer named it, with its definition, in a technical service bulletin filed with the US road safety regulator, and that OEM wording agrees with the standard's own enumeration. Its neighbours have no such document, so they remain undocumented rather than guessed.
Likely causes
Start here
- Carbon build-up in the throttle bore · moderate
- Failed manifold runner actuator · moderate
Less common
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Community experience
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