Very odd. Yesterday my check engine light came on just as I pulled into my neighborhood on my way home from work (Approx 10 mile drive). Car began to sputter like crazy and had a few backfires, had trouble getting it to rev past 3k rpm, occaisionally got it to 4k rpm, and it topped out somewhere in the 20-30mph range. Turned the car off, and checked the oil with it still warm, decided to add a bit more oil and it started up fine. Let it warm up for a while and then shut the car off for the night. On my way back to work this morning, the car began its problems again after driving approx. the same distance that I had the night before, just pulled into the parking lot next to work. Added another quart of oil and made sure it was full. On my way home again, car gave me the same trouble after approx the same distance traveled (not for certain, I had to drop someone off, though they do live close to me.) This time I simply turned the car off and then immediately back on, and the car ran fine. Any ideas on what this could be?


Edit: Car is a 1990 GXL 2+2, stock with ~37k on rebuild.

 

So is the car loosing a lot of oil very fast? If that's the case then you're going to need to fix that soon!

In my opinion I would pull the spark plugs and wires and replace them. You might also do a compression check while you're at it.

This could also be an ECU problem, so check the grounds in the engine bay for corrosion.

I know this sounds like a lot, but stuff like this could really be anything, LoL.

 

I don't think the oil problem is related, was just one of the basic maintenece things I needed to check and needed attention anyway.

The thing that gets me is that the problem completely goes away with a restart... kinda like windows and your computer :P.

But checking the ECU grounds sounds like a good place to start. Well, at least, I now have an idea of where to start.

Not sure if the problem is related or not, but might as well list all the problems incase of the possibility. If it doesn't sound related to you guys (I'm a rotary newb :P) then I will start a new thread in the audio area for it.

Basically, my car was broken into last week, and now that I've got my head unit back in (they were unable to get it out in time) I began to listen to some music. However, the songs seemed to skip at shorter and shorter intervals until the CDs stopped playing altogether. At first I just assumed the theives damaged the unit, but after putting the stock unit back in, it does the same thing.