Drivetrain/Transmission

[baggydew]

On the last several trips, while in "drive" the transmission slips out of gear and the engine revs. As soon as I let off on the gas the transmission smoothly re-engages. This happens at highway speeds and is very intermittent. The last 500 mile trip, it happened 4 times. The level and color of the transmission fluid is normal. My repair manuals tell me that transmission problems should be left to experts and gives no guidence.

[skater]

Try turning off overdrive and see if it still does it. If not, I suspect your overdrive gear is out.

[baggydew]

Hadn't thought about the overdrive. Took it to the only tranny guy in town...don't think he wanted to mess with it.
Told me he took it for a test drive and couldn't duplicate the problem but said something about a speed sensor in the transmission...He didn't seem all that concerned but like I said, I don't think he wanted to bother with it. Thanks for the input Skater. This site is great.

[skater]

A bad speed sensor can cause all kinds of oddball problems, so I wouldn't exclude that. But, yeah, I'd take it to a tranny specialist, if you can find one. And the first time I took mine to a transmission shop, they said the problem I was experiencing was an engine problem... turned out to be a bad torque converter, which a transmission shop should have known.

[baggydew]

I think I found the problem...Searching E40D transmission sites on the WEB, I found a fellow with the same problem. It turns out to be a faulty Manual Lever Position Sensor. This part is located on the drivers side of the tranny case and the shift linkage is attached to it along with an electrical connector. The problem on the '94 and prior years was that water intrusion causes these things to fail. In '95 they redesigned the connector so the new one that I installed had to be rewired The actual connector was supplied with the part. Apparently this part can cause all sorts of wierd shifting problems including the inadvertent shifting into neutral. I put the thing on and had the tranny flushed and filled with Synthetic ATF which shoud last 60K miles instead of the recommended 30k between ATF changes. So far...so good.