Problem with '98 Prelude

Hey,

I have a '98 Prelude and this past weekend I was driving along the highway
when all of a sudden my car started to slow down like I took my foot off the
gas. I tapped the gas pedal a bit and it kind of sounded like the engine
was reving up a bit but the car continued to slow down. When I took it out
of gear and tried to rev it up it hesitated at first but then was normal. I
put it back into 5th and continued down the road for about a minute when it
did it again. Once again I took it out of gear, reved it up a bit (without
hesitation this time), put it back into 5th again and same thing happened a
total of 3 times. I tried 4th gear (thought maybe 5th was screwed) but it
did the exact same thing except when I tried to put it back into 4th after
reving up in neutral it just slowed down like my foot was off the gas. I
pulled over on the side of the highway for a minute with the engine off and
since then it hasn't done it. I drive between Toronto, ON and Burlington,
VT a lot (7 hours) and I'm afraid of my car completely dying on the side of
the road so I want to get this fixed but I have no idea what the problem
could be. First I thought it was the gears slipping or clutch was going,
but why does it seem to work fine now? Is it possible the fuel filter is
dirty? I have 145,000km on the car, however my speedo is out of wack by
+5km, so it's actually more like 139,000km not that it makes much of a
difference though. Any help someone could provide would be much
appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

I suppose there are a lot of possibilities here, but just to get the ball
rolling with a common problem:

Could be the distributor coil. They don't always fail fully all of a sudden. As
they age, they start to act up. Last year my 91 Civic began to die while driving
in warm weather for 30 minutes or so. Sometimes it would recover quickly, and I
could restart. Twice it didn't. When this felt like it was about to happen, I
tried changing speeds and gears (manual transmission), and, as with yours, this
didn't help. Letting the car cool off helped but only as a temporary fix. The
problem was worsening. The point is that the coil becomes more vulnerable to hot
temperatures with age.

When's the last time you replaced the distributor coil?

Updates for the benefit of the archive are welcome.

Good luck.

 

================

Problems at highway speed could involve the ignition system, the fuel
pump (Main Relay) or the fuel filter. Could be water in the gas too.

I'd run a tank of gasohol (Mohawk PLUS) through it.

Check your records and see if you've changed you fuel filter, and read
this article and see if this symptom applies to you.

http://techauto.tripod.com/mainrelay.htm

'Curly'



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