Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Troubleshooting Car shuts down while driving, starts up fine

Hey,
I've been having a problem with my 98 v6 for the past few weeks. Every once in a while when I'm driving (usually on the expressway), my engine will just shut off. The lights, radio, heat, etc all continue to work but the gas pedal does nothing. Usually after this happens, the oil and battery lights will come on. I turn the key off, wait for a minute then the car usually starts up fine again. Today it did it again. This time, I started the car back up and like a minute later it shut down again. I started it up again and for about 5 minutes it would hesitate like it was shifting roughly between two gears, then the rest of the ride to work was fine. When it first started happening I thought it was related to my IMRC not working. I brought the car in about a week ago and the mechaic fixed the IMRC but said he didn't see any reason that it would be shutting down like that. I got it back from him 1.5 weeks ago and it's been running fine since then, until today. Anybody have any ideas what might be causing that? My battery is pretty old if that makes any difference.

If a car comes into my bay with a problem " stalls intermittenly when driving" the very first thing I do before anything else is check the fuel pressure.

Sometimes people dont replace there fuel filters. They over the years do what they are suppoused to do, filter out impurties. Well if it gets to plugged up it can cuase less fuel to flow, not combine this with hitting bumps on the road, moving the stuff around in the tiny line in the fuel filter. You can get a new fuel problem that way.

Quite a few times I have solved your problem by replacing a fuel filter.

The ironic thing is that I've been meaning to change my fuel filter for a while now. In fact, I was planning on bringing the car in this weekend because my CEL came on again after the car was worked on. The mechanic said he'd try some things, one of which was to change the fuel filter. Also, the first time the car ever shut off on me happened after I hit a fairly large bump. Hopefully thats what the problem is.