We have a 1994 Geo Metro we got used with "?" miles on it. It's been a pretty good little car.
It gets driven for very short distances by my wife (1.2 miles to work in the morning, then home at night.) It's been below zero (and usually more than ten below) at night when she drives home, for about a week and a half. I don't know if that's pertinent, but..
Decided to take it instead of the Corolla yesterday. Start it up, it's running fine. Drove about 4 to 5 miles at around 60 MPH. Suddenly there was a loss of power and a huge cloud of gray smoke (not the white "steam" cars emit in cold weather) blew out the tailpipe. I backed off the throttle and coasted a bit, the smoke stopped. I gave it a little more gas and more smoke came out but this time, a lot less. I pulled over.
It was idling roughly. I turned it off and checked all over under the hood. All fluids looked & smelled fine and were topped up.
I started it again. It cranked slowly, idled a bit roughly but seemed to start smoothing out a bit. I made a U-turn and headed home. After about a minute, everything seemed fine. Power back to normal, no smoke.
I spoke with a more experienced friend about it and he thought maybe a chunk of, uh, I believe "crap" was the technical term he used, broke off and hit the catalytic converter whereupon it disintegrated/burned.
Maybe there was a charcoal buildup in the header due to it not getting heated up for quite a while?
I know the engine puts out a lot of carbon soot. The inside of the tailpipe is coated with it, and the EGR apparatus was plugged with it until I cleaned it out.
Incidentally, the catalytic converter only has about 4000 miles on it (but mostly the short-distance driving.) The muffler is maybe a year and a half old but is starting to rot out and getting slightly noisy due to the frequent short trips leaving it wet all the time.
After I spoke with my friend, we took it on a round-trip of about 25-30 miles. No problems whatsoever. *Almost* a disappointment, since we've ordered a Matrix for her that should be here in two or three weeks and it would be cool to find out we'd gotten the last useful mile out of the old Metro.
Any thoughts on what could have caused the smoke cloud/power loss?