Want to diagnose the Buick??
I appreciate many people’s opinions on this forum, a great wealth of practical knowledge. Just wondering if anyone wants to weigh in and help me diagnose my Buick to I can figure out where to take it?
I have a 2003 Buick Regal (I believe it’s a GS) that has 3.8L engine and an auto transmission with gears 1-3 and an Overdrive for highway speeds. I bought it with 78K miles on it and now it just turned 145K. It’s been a pretty good car but now has had more share of problems as its gets older. I’ve driven mostly mid-to-higher mileage cars and have never had to replace a tranny or had much work done with them. I know I should have changed my tranny fluid and filter probably in the first year or so that I owned the car but didn’t. This fall it felt like it was shifting a bit harder and the fluid certainly wasn’t crisp looking so I took the car into the shop in early Nov. for changing the fluid and filter. This place is one of the bigger tranny shops in my metro. I told them to be “gentle” with it, probably didn’t need a flush as I had heard old pieces can break off with such pressure. They got it done and didn’t say they had seen or found anything else and I was on my way a few hours later. I think the desk guy was a fan of the 3800 engine/Regal and said, “I had countered the weakest point- the tranny”.
About a month later (I think--early in Dec.), I started having issues gaining highway speed in the same normal time that the car had done before. I had to push the rpms higher to build speed, especially climbing a hill or coming off of a dead stop. I never went over 4000 to reach 50-60 miles an hour but often it was 2500 to 3500 and took a while, bad news trying to get onto a fast highway. Usually when it reached 60 mph, it would shift down to the typical 1500 rpm and cruise along (the roads to my rural work place are all about 60 mph roads). Sometimes it would almost “cough” if I pushed it hard going up a hill (seems funny to call it a cough with a fuel-injected engine). Never did it just rev super high into very high rpms like if you hit the gas hard while it was in neutral.
It sort was acting like it did last year when I changed the fuel filter so did that and there was no improvement. I next thought maybe it was the air filter and changed that and it did seem to improve a small bit, the air filter did look sort of dirty (I drive a lot of gravel roads). But the problem persists. And it’s sort of inconsistent. Last week, I went out to my bro’s country place on a secondary highway and from the last light in town until an intersection that has a gas station stop on it (8 miles), it never made it to 60mph and was running at 2500+ rpms at 55. After the 4-way stop, the next four miles, it got up to 60 after some time and eased back to 1500 rpms. Coming back into my bedroom town Christmas eve afternoon, I had to climb a pretty good hill after a stop and a turn and it struggled to get to 30 mph, I had to run it on the side of the road so traffic could get around me until I finally got it to 50 the rest of the way. Doing that hill in the opposite direction this morning I climbed over doing 50 but then couldn’t get it to 60 on the flats but had it going 60 on flats stretches of another road coming home. I’ve had it on the freeway twice since this problem surfaced and we did ok but I couldn’t reach 70 really and was doing over 3000 rpms.
Now I’m wondering if maybe my cat is clogged or is clogging up but I don’t smell any sulfur order in the car. Once guy at work thinks maybe a vacuum hose on the tranny got pinched or my brother thought maybe an o-ring got knocked out of place when they changed the fluid. So what do you all think, the tranny having issues, my cat getting plugged, or something else?? I probably should get the car into one shop or another after this snow storm breaks and it really gets cold sometime in January. Thanks in advance!!
