Questions and Answers
Stuck In Reverse
Q. Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you can help us. Today we accompanied our 18 year old son, to check out a 1990 Dodge Daytona for which he paid the private party with just about all of his hard earned cash. Of course it worked perfectly for the long test drive, and my husband spent a great deal of time looking it over.
We drove it an hour home, and everything was fine. But then after we started it up again at home, and put some air in the tires, suddenly it became stuck in reverse!
It is a 1990 Dodge Daytona 2.5 liter 4 cylinder, 5 speed with cruise, power steering, and power brakes. It's a two door, hatchback, with 103,000 miles on it, fuel injection, brand new battery, and passed inspection. The A/C works, but we knew that the heater needs to be repaired before we went to see it.
At this point, we can't even get it to go forward, so that we can get it to the mechanic to fix the heater, and it is very cooooold in Missouri right now.
Any ideas? Any suggestions would be greatly, greatly appreciated! We have no experience with Dodge Daytona's and don't know their quirks yet. My husband enjoys working on cars when he can reach the part to be repaired, if it doesn't require highly specialized equipment, but he hadn't done anything on this one, as we'd barely gotten it home.
Hope you have a wonderful holiday celebration! My husband had hoped to teach our 18 year old how to drive a stick during the long weekend, but now we are literally stuck!
Hope you have a chance to help us, or to steer us in the right direction.
Thank you so very much!
KathyA. I am sorry Kathy, but I'm afraid there is something inside the transmission that is either broken or jammed. The transmission will have to come out and be cracked open to see what the problem is.
This is an example of no matter how carefully you check out a car today, there is no guarantee that something will not go wrong tomorrow. I feel bad for your son, I know how hard it is to save up enough money to buy that first car.
A similar thing happened to me with my first car. I saved up my money, found a car and had my Uncle who was a mechanic for the City of New York look at it for me. Bought the car and two days later, while driving on the Southern State Parkway on Long Island, the left rear wheel fell off. 75 mph (Yes, I was young and speeding) and I found myself with three wheels and no brakes.
