Pontiac Repair: 1993 Pontiac Grand Am GT Stalling, gm vehicles, torque converter

Question
It seams after it gets warmed up real good, the transmission does not shift out of gear or drive.  so when you stop at a stop sign, it's not shifting out of gear or whatever and kills the motor.  You can start it ok then as soon as you put it in to gear it like it's in 3rd or 4th gear starting out.  We had to push the car, get it rolling then put in gear to get home.  Once we were in town we were able to keep things rolling by putting it into neutral and then back into drive again.  I was driving it around town this morning doing stuff but I'm guessing it didn't get hot enough to do it.  Any thoughts?


Answer
Mark this is actually a pretty common thing with GM vehicles. What is happening is the torque converter is getting stuck in lockup so that it has the same effect as dumping the clutch on a manual. The first thing you can try to have done is to have the tranny filter changed and have a flush done. Just changing the filter only changes about 1/3 of the fluid so the flush is needed to get the fluid in the converter changed. If this doesn't fix your problem then the lockup solenoid is probably bad which will require a tranny shop unless you can obtain a repair manual and feel confident enough to tackle it. Hope this helps and good luck :)