| If you mean - Will the car accelerate faster? The answer is No, you won't notice a difference. You should see slightly better gas mileage with a good sensor, and you may have a smoother idle.
I have not done a 318, but generally speaking, oxygen sensors are easy to replace, and don't require any special tools. A combination wrench worked better than the special oxygen sensor socket on every car I have owned. You just need to get the front wheels of the car up on ramps. One advantage of the 318 is that you have only two sensors rather than four.
Oxygen sensors generally don't fail suddenly, unless their heater element fails. The normal failure mode is that they slowly degrade over time, getting slower and weaker until the computer starts to complain about them. Assuming good fuel, they last from 100k miles to 200k miles, depending on design and operating temperature. The rear one lasts a bit longer than the front one, but I usually replace them in pairs.
A bad batch of gasoline, with too much sulfur, or some waste industrial solvents that sometimes mysteriously find their way into the fuel supply, can kill oxygen sensors in a single tank full.  | 
02-07-2008, 09:07 AM
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