Hi,

I first posted to this forum nearly a year ago. My problem seems to be I think it is called kickdown, it doesn't change between gears very well, car seems to virtualy go into neutral yada, yada. I tried eveything the guys suggested on this forum to no avail. I took it to an auto trnas specicialist, who fixed other problems related to the trans, but could never replicate the problem I was describing to him, despite the fact he took my car home one night to take it for an extended drive in the hope the problem would occur.

It got to the stage when I was leaving for workbefore 6am so I wouldn't get stuck in peak hour traffic, as all the stop start would make it worse. I am posting to this forum again as there has been another development, and I'm hoping that someone on this forum may have knowledge of what I'm experiencing. I downloaded the full workshop manual from this wonderful site, but even it does not cover my problem.

The new development is that when the weather/humidity cooled down in autumn the probem mysteriously vanished. Since then I can count on one hand the times it has happened since then. Now as the weather is starting to warm up, the problem is returning.

Ah you might have a faulty tcu, right if you exprince this proble on hot days :) One way to test this fault is get a hair dryer and blast the tcu with hair dryer for about 10sec and drive the car. See what happen, if it does your problem :) Tcu might be faulty.

Listen I am by far an expert on automatic transmissions here but just going to throw this out there, is the trans cooler partially blocked at all and/or has the gearbox had a full fluid flush?

is it going into neutral with the overdrive on
it will be the TCU or a solenoid problem if the box drives ok
most of the time

One of the things the trans guy fixed was replacingthe overdrive clutch. The remaining problem is when it changed gears, I don'tknow if it actually goes into neutral but behaves if it does. Putting foot on sccelerator it just revs. I mentioned compuuter to the mechnaic and he reckons they just go totally, not have intermitant faults on the way out. From my experience in building computers I sort of know how sensitive electronics are to heat, and think that maybe the problem. But it seemes to happen more when the outside temp is higher rather than be related to the temp of the engine. I did some quite long drives during the wintermonths and nothing happened. But when the outside temp goes up (and especially humidity) it happens all the time.

Capacitor inside the TCU do get old and stuff. So I would suggest to swap the TCU and see how it goes from there :)

on the 4 cyl it will be below the radio
on the floor held in with screws to the floor

think it has 3 plugs of wiring