Put my Corvette in storage for winter & have been driving a 4X4 beater car.
It started shifting funny from 1st-2nd when starting out (it’s an automatic), and when I’d floor it to pass on the highway it sputtered and wouldn’t shift down. Weird thing is, if I lifted off the the gas pedal during acceleration or while passing, it would clunk into second gear.
Did this for about a week. Then the check engine light went on. Code reader said it was the “Shift Solenoid B”. Decided I would get it fixed at the end of the month while I was on vacation and wouldn’t need to drive it anyway.
Drove it with the funky shifting and engine light for the last 2 weeks for about 500 miles.
Then…yesterday…as though nothing had been wrong…it stopped!
It just stopped doing that.
Check engine light went out. Car shifts perfectly. I can’t get it to do it again. I floor it to get on the freeway. I floor it while at highway speed. it shifts perfectly. Like nothing was ever wrong. I’ve put on over 100 miles trying to get it to do it again. It shifts perfectly.
Had the car been sitting a while waiting for you to start driving it again? That can cause all kinds of bizarre behavior, especially with fluid/hydraulic systems.
Many are self-curing with a little time and exercise.
Perhaps the shift solenoid was stuck and somehow got jarred unstuck. I’m sure there are other possibilities, but it’s not unheard of for certain car problems to go away for no apparent reason. Sometimes it was a sort of fluke and the problem doesn’t recur, other times it was a temporary respite and the problem comes back.
Nah. even in the summer time I use it at least once a week.
Dunno. Other than putting the code reader on it I didn’t have anyone look at it.
I just think it’s weird that the car would not shift right for a couple of weeks and then boom it’s alright. Cars don’t heal like people. How great would that be?
I had the fan relay on my old Cadillac stick a few times (it’s supposed to turn off the engine cooling fan when you shut the car off). When it happened I whacked it with my hand and it shut off. Since it only happened once every few months I was going to wait until it got worse before I replaced the relay.
And then it stopped failing and has worked fine ever since (about 7 years).
A relay is essentially the same thing as a solenoid (a relay is basically a solenoid with a switch attached to it). So yeah, I can picture the solenoid getting sticky and then somehow unsticking itself. If there’s a little bit of dirt or corrosion in it caused by it sitting for a while, repeatedly activating the solenoid could knock the corrosion/dirt out of the mechanism and it may work fine from now on.
Pretty much that, but it’s not so simple and not something to be too sanguine about. The shift solenoids on an automatic transmission have ATF flowing through them and it’s likely that the “dirt” that caused the problem was crud (used up friction material + possibly metal pieces of the transmission itself) flowing through the transmission.
Take it as a sign to change your ATF and replace any serviceable ATF filters. (Believe it or not, unfortunately not all cars *have *serviceable ATF filters.) But it might *not *be a good idea to get a transmission flush, as some shops call it. You want to replace the fluid, but you don’t necessarily want to knock crud loose that might otherwise have stayed in place, because it might end up moving from a place where it was doing no harm, to a place where it *does *do harm.
'99 Suzuki Vitara. 4 cyl automatic. I’ve had a couple of Vitaras over the years and I don’t think the components they used remained consistent at all. So what kind of tranny is in it could be a huge WAG.
This is a common misconception. The way a transmission flush works is the machine is hooked up to the transmission cooler lines and then the car is started. The fluid gets exchanged solely by the pressure of the pump in the transmission itself, so it’s not subjecting the transmission to anything beyond what it would see in normal operation.
Transmission flushes generally aren’t necessary if you’re doing regular drain-and-fills, but in this case since there might be crud circulating in the fluid occasionally getting stuck in the solenoid, doing a flush and getting all the fluid out might be a good idea.
