A/T Kickdown issues - 2000 OBW Limited Where's the cable?

Question

I should state before anything else that the car has 96K miles and I've only put on 3000 of them.

The kickdown from 3rd to 2nd at ~30-45 mph is downright ugly. Usually it won't do anything until my foot is almost to the floor, at which point it decides it wants FIRST instead. Not good!

I assumed that there was a kickdown cable coming off the throttle plate shaft. There are two cables there and one was showing about a half-inch of slack, so I adjusted the slack out of the sloppy one.

I took it out for a test drive, and found out that I'd just fixed the (minor) slop in the cruise control instead. That was nice but not what I reaalllyy wanted.

My wife refuses to let me go underneath cars anymore after I tried bench-pressing a Plymouth Reliant, so I obviously haven't checked there yet for a cable at the transmission bottom or sides.

I've finally convinced my significant other to let me go under vehicles if I buy some expensive jack stands. (a 20 year battle won!) but I don't have them yet.

Can someone tell me if the kickdown cable DOES appear under the hood and accessible?

PS-- this newsgroup is great!~

etienne · Accepted Answer

Unless I am mistaken. Most new cars today do not have a 'kickdown' cable. The ECU senses the throttle position and all sorts of other variables like vehicle speed, etc... and then decides if and when it will drop a gear or even drop two gears.

nobody wrote:

Carl 1 Lucky Texan · Answer

I agree. This is more likely a problem with old tranny fluid gumming up a valve seat, a bad valve solenoid or bad TCU. I'd try a 'power flush' of the transmission. Or 3-4 successive 'drain/refill/drive for a week' cycles.

Carl

nobody · Answer

The tranny was power-flushed about a month ago by a known "subie-friendly" shop. The owner and head mech said the ATF that came out actually looked quite good.

I talked to him on the phone today and we decided to drop the pan and look further. They didn't drop the pan for the flush as this model has a small spin-on filter for the ATF and not the usual filter inside the pan.

FWIW, I started shifting it manually and holding the shifts to near redline intentionally and it seems to be improving.

A/T Kickdown issues - 2000 OBW Limited Where's the cable?

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