I just got back from the dealer who said it must be normal. Ugh.
I have an '04 Liberty 3.7L w/automatic. When starting from a dead stop (I'm talking traffic jam type stop-and-go) and I put just enough pressure on the gas to make the car move, and instantly let up the pedal, the engine doesn't return to idle immediately. This causes me to have to hit the brakes so I'm not propelled into the car in front of me. The accelerator does eventually drop to a normal idle but it's between 1.5 to 2 seconds.
Related to this is when driving slowly (5-10 mph) and trying to maintain a steady speed, the accelerator seems to have just two states: accelerating or decelerating but not just a steady RPM to maintain the slow speed.
I just realized that using the accelerator pedal, I can't reach RPMs between idle and 1100. It's either idling or 1100 RPMs. This seems to explain the above issues.
Has anyone else seen this?
The service manager let me take another Liberty for a ride and it's accelerator did the same thing only worse. In some cases, the other one didn't drop to idle at all after releasing the gas pedal.
Thanks for reading... Dave