Not far from my home in suburban Detroit, I was driving south on Southfield Road, where the road becomes the onramp to the northern end of the southbound Southfield Freeway. As I accelerated from the last stoplight, I felt something unusual from the gas pedal. By the time I was on the ramp I realized something was keeping the throttle open. I fiddled around with my foot to make sure it wasn’t a water bottle or something else on the floor jamming the gas pedal as I considered that I was going too fast for the heavy traffic, too heavy to try to stop completely and, in any case, there wasn’t a shoulder there for me to stop.
The tachometer was right around 4,100 rpm. The SOHC Saturn 1.9 liter motor isn’t exactly gutless, but you really have to keep it above 3,000 rpm if you want to accelerate briskly —4,100 is certainly in the sweet spot in the power band.
I tapped the brakes and while they kept the car from accelerating, the pedal felt unusually hard. That’s probably because I’ve never braked under heavy throttle before. That’s when I realized it was pretty serious; no panic, but things definitely weren’t cool. I rode the brakes, figuring it was confusing the driver behind me since I wasn’t slowing much. Then I shifted into neutral, which at least kept the car from accelerating more and kept the brakes from fading. By then I had to make a decision, stay on the freeway or pull off at the first exit, which meant getting over in a hurry as it was approaching quickly.
With the transmission in neutral, the engine started to oscillate up and down a couple hundred revs, almost like it was hitting a rev limiter, which this engine doesn’t have and in any case, that’s way below the redline so I wasn’t worried about throwing a rod or some serious damage. Still, something was not right and I had to get the car safely stopped. As soon as I got up the ramp, I turned down the first side street, and with the car still in neutral I stopped it, shut off the ignition and then shifted the transmission into park. Dropping it into park at 4,100 rpm probably would not have been good for the transmission’s parking pawl, or the transmission mounts.
Looking down into the footwell, I could tell that there was nothing obstructing the gas pedal, so I got out to check under the hood. I caught a whiff of hot metal — likely the brake rotors — as I walked to the front of the car. When I opened the hood I discovered that I had done something stupid the day before which caused the problem....
After my little episode of unintended acceleration, once I got the car safely stopped, I discovered that when I went to put away the funnel I was using to get the fluid into the dipstick/filler tube, I had forgotten to put the dipstick back. I don’t know how it stayed where it was on top of the engine for almost 400 miles of driving, but by the time I was entering the Southfield expressway, the plastic pull-ring on the end of the dipstick had managed to work itself around part of the linkage for the fuel injection throttle body, preventing it from returning to the idle position.
Excerpted from
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/201...drivers-panic/
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Originally Posted by SQive
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