P0016 on Peugeot: How to Diagnose & Fix

The Prince-family EP6 engine suffers from premature timing chain tensioner failure, causing chain slack and potential valve-to-piston contact. Early production units had an undersized tensioner that was later revised.

The RCZ shares the EP6 timing chain tensioner weakness with other PSA/BMW Prince engine applications. The hydraulic tensioner loses pressure, allowing chain slack that causes timing skip and valve damage in severe cases.

The 508 I's 1.6 THP petrol is the PSA/BMW-developed EP6 'Prince' engine, whose timing chain and tensioner are a documented weak point. The root problem is not the chain itself but an over-soft hydraulic chain tensioner that bleeds off oil pressure when the engine is shut down; on the next cold start the slack chain rattles against its guides for anything from a couple of seconds to half a minute until pressure builds. Left alone, the chain elongates, valve timing drifts, the engine management logs a correlation fault and — in the worst cases — the chain jumps and destroys the valvetrain. The problem became severe enough in Europe that Austrian owners organised a collective complaint action against Peugeot Austria in 2011 over elongated timing chains in 1.6 THP engines, and forum consensus is that later production ran a revised chain and tensioner that reduced but did not eliminate the fault. Diesel HDi/BlueHDi 508s do not share this engine.

First-generation 3008s with the PSA/BMW Prince 1.6 petrol engines (turbo THP 156 and naturally aspirated VTi 120) suffer premature timing chain stretch caused by a soft original chain and a tensioner that is starved of oil, aggravated by the engine's aggressive variable valve timing. A stretched chain rattles on cold start and can jump or break, putting the engine out of synchronization and risking valve-to-piston contact and full engine failure. Peugeot issued revised chain and tensioner parts and a TSB, and forum-documented failures occurred well under 60,000 miles.

The PSA/BMW co-developed 1.6 'Prince' engine (EP6 VTi and EP6DT/EP6CDT THP) in the 308 I and early 308 II suffers well-documented timing chain stretch, often before 100,000 km. The original chain was too narrow for the load and the hydraulic tensioner bleeds down overnight, producing the characteristic 'death rattle' on cold start; left unaddressed the chain can skip teeth, throwing valve timing out and risking severe valve/piston damage. PSA revised the chain, tensioner and guides (brown-to-white PVC guides) around 2012-2013, and extended oil-change intervals are a known aggravating factor.

Peugeot confirms that previous-generation 1.0 and 1.2 PureTech engines can experience an oil-pressure issue resulting from premature timing-belt degradation and provides conditional support. Its published terms cover affected 1.0/1.2 non-turbo engines produced June 2012-June 2022 and 1.2 turbo engines produced April 2014-June 2022. The 208 uses a belt, not the timing chain incorrectly named in the frozen solution, and the frozen 150-owner count has no traceable dataset.