Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests help with my "everyday" driver! (long)

folks-

i have an '86 olds ciera which i use as an everyday driver. looks bad, runs good! has 287,000 miles and just keeps on going. v6, 2 barrel, atx, 2 door. original engine and trans.

this past sunday, start it up to go to church, no speedometer. also, after a few min of driving, the service engine soon light comes on. first time this has happened.

come out of church, on way home, speedo seems to begin functioning normally again, and ses light goes out.

monday, same thing- no speedo, ses light on in the morning. afternoon, all seems well.

today, no speedo all day (drove maybe 175 miles round trip), ses light on all day long.

in all of this there seem to be no driveability problems or issues. all other guages seem to function as designed.

while i don't exactly know just how the speedo works on this car, i am beginning to guess that perhaps this is a "computer malfunction".

can anyone shed some light on what my problem might be? i would deeply appreciate the assistance.

go get your car scanned for any codes. sometimes they are still in memory if the light is out

I'm pretty sure it's a cable driven speedo. Dunno why it would only work sometimes, though.

I know my old 85 Celebrity had a cable driven speedo, so I'm pretty sure they didn't change it in 1 year.

with pre-OBD2 GM cars, it's pretty easy to get the computer to flash the codes. Check online as I believe you just need to short pins A & B and the codes will flash on that SES light.

You may have a failed or failing vehicle speed sensor, if this vehicle has one.

It seems the other engine choices were fuel injected (according to PartsAmerica.com) and there is a VSS listed for this vehicle, so it's reasonable that this is the code. But check to be sure.

HTH,

TB