i have a 97 ponitac grand prix with a 3.8 i was on a road trip this
thanksgiving and the car was runnign great
but as i was coming back home the car no longer wanted to run on drive
as i hit the gas the car would only rev as if it was on nuetral all the
other gears like reverse, nuetral, first and second work fine its only
when i put it on drive where it dosent want to run it act like the car
is on nuetral
what could be the problem?

<ekco89 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote

The transmission is the problem. There's no engine braking in drive, so
there's an overrunning clutch in the transmission that allows "coasting" in
any gear with the selector in D. The other gears don't use it. That's just
one possibility. It doesn't really matter what the trouble is, though.
You'll just have to take it to a transmission shop, and no matter what's
wrong with it, they'll want to do a full overhaul.

i own a grand prix and have not had any problems with the tranny yet,
but...i also own a grand marquis and even though it's of course not a
pontiac,and i'm not sure how close gm trannys are to fords,i had the same
symptoms as yours with my grand marquis,the car would work fine in
reverse,but you had to gun the hell out of it in drive to even get it to
move ahead very slowly,after several seconds of high rev,.it would start to
inch ahead very slowly,but move. it wound up being the a defective trans
strator and the defective part fried the forward clutch plates,i did the
rebuilding in my garage with the help of the internet and a few mechanics
advice,but it was very time consuming and hard even though it cost a
fraction of the price to do it myself.
"Joe" <Joe (AT) dontspam (DOT) net> wrote