'93 Gran Prix, 3.1, 120K miles, mom's car. Engine will run perfectly for a time and then suddenly lose power, idle very rough, and then after a short time it will come out of it "instantaneously" --which suggests to me it's something electrical rather than fuel related. She says she smells fuel when it's doing this. Took it to a dealership, described the symptoms, and they couldn't get it to act up on them (of course), but they changed plugs, wires, & fuel filter, just because it had never been done in 120K miles. The car's not had anything but a battery and tires replaced since she bought it at 59K, so I'm quite sure nothing's been done to the car other than what we've done. I knew that making the above mentioned repairs wouldn't address the way the car had been acting, and it didn't. I'm wondering if it's not a coil pack going bad, since it had original plugs and the coils have probably been working WAY overtime trying to fire those worn out plugs which probably had huge gaps by now. That's kind of how it runs when it's acting up--like one of the coil packs suddenly delivers weak spark, then snaps out of it. BTW when it first happened, it had just gone on a long drive on interstate, 3 hours at 70 mph, stopped to eat, came out and it would barely run. Then it just snapped out of it and ran fine all the way home until sometimes when I'd stop at stop sign, it would run very rough and then I could give it gas and after a short time it'd instantly snap out of it and have full power. Is that typical behaviour of a bad coil pack, ign module, something else..?
- posted
18 years ago