My mom's 2004 Lincoln LS has been having some strange issues for a while now, mainly transmission related. It's totally random, but sometimes you'll be driving along and go down a hill or something where you have to let off the gas and let the car coast. When you get to the bottom of the hill and start to get into the gas again, the engine just revs freely, you have to get it up to about 3,000 RPM's and then BAM, it catches and jerks the car real hard. I can't even figure out where to check the transmission fluid. Sometimes it also shifts erratically, particularly when you go to pass someone on the interstate and punch it, it'll stumble around like it's trying to find the right gear to go into or something. There is a series of rumbling noises that come from the transmission when that happens, which you can feel throughout the car. Then this morning, she was on her way to work, had been running about 75 mph for about 30 miles. She got off the interstate, made a left turn, and when she hit the gas, this little yellow light that looks like a wrench started flashing on the gauge cluster, and the car practically lost all power. It was still running, but it was very, very sluggish and wouldn't hardly rev above 2,000 RPM. It would only go about 15 mph. It also had a very steady miss fire while this was happening. This is the second time this has happened in the last two weeks. You can shut the car off and immediately start it back up, and it runs perfectly normal again like nothing happened. I took it to Advance this afternoon and had them pull the codes, and the only thing they found was a code that said the EGR valve was bad. We bought the car used in June 2006 with 29,000 miles on it. Engine was replaced in the spring of 2007 at 63,000 miles due to an oil change place double gasketing the filter, which led to a spun rod bearing. The replacement engine came from a wrecked car that supposedly only had 20,000 miles on it. The car is currently at about 155,000, and the transmission issues have been present since about 115,000, haven't really shown any signs of worsening. The misfire thing with the flashing wrench just started in the past couple of weeks. I'm pretty stumped as to what that means. I'm going to try putting new spark plugs in it tomorrow. 155,000 on this car already. Good grief. Still seems like just yesterday I totaled the '02 Taurus SEL that this car replaced. We bought the Taurus brand new, it had 138,000 on it when it got wrecked. So had it not got wrecked, it would have like 284,000 on it now. Damn.
