QuestionMy 1995 Buick Regal has an intermittent starting problem that seems to be related to the enging temperature. The car starts 95 percent of the time. Once every week or two it fails to start. It cranks at full speed, but does not start. There is no sound of any cylinders firing.
The problem almost always occurs under very specific circumstances: The car is started successfully cold, then driven for about 5 minutes, then the engine is turned off (at this point the engine is warm--not yet up to normal operating temperature). When an attempt is made to restart the engine 10 or 30 minutes later, it cranks but does not start. Further attempts to start the car fail, until, eventually, anywhere from one hour to 24 hours later, it starts successfully.
By contrast, when the engine is started cold, then driven 10 minutes or so, long enough to reach normal operating temperature, and then turned off, it will always restart successfully minutes or hours later.
To sum up, the engine occasionally fails to start a few minutes after having been shut off halfway warmed up but not yet at normal operating temperature.
My mechanic said he cannot diagnose the problem since I cannot reproduce it for him (it always starts for the mechanic).
AnswerHi Jim,
I sympathize with your mechanic, and he is right.
You wouldn't want him to just start replacing parts till he accidentally gets the right one. That could get rather expensive.
If you know that it will act that way, why not leave it at his shop overnight, then go there in a different vehicle the next morning, and go for a ride.
He needs to know if there is spark, if the fuel pump is running, and if there is pulsed power to the injectors.
My thoughts are a bad coolant temperature sensor, but there is sure a possibility something else is causing one of the mentioned systems to be out of parameters.
Van
