Help Me With my Car Problem

[BreakfastBurrito]

My car is a POS. 93' Taurus with 219,000 miles. I should really get rid of it but I don't want to spend the money on a new one and I'm not savvy enough to not get screwed if I opted to buy a used, slightly better POS that I could drive for another 3 years. Anyhow, the problem.

Sometimes when driving on the highway something happens which I can only describe as the engine choking to death. The car loses power rapidly, if I floor it it can still only go about 50 mph, and it starts shaking violently as well. In addition, the brakes instantly stiffen as if I'd turned the car off and pumped the brakes a few times. If I pull over, turn the car off and restart it, it resets to normal immediately. What is this? Can it be fixed?

[ripdog]

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My car is a POS. 93' Taurus with 219,000 miles. I should really get rid of it but I don't want to spend the money on a new one and I'm not savvy enough to not get screwed if I opted to buy a used, slightly better POS that I could drive for another 3 years. Anyhow, the problem.

Sometimes when driving on the highway something happens which I can only describe as the engine choking to death. The car loses power rapidly, if I floor it it can still only go about 50 mph, and it starts shaking violently as well. In addition, the brakes instantly stiffen as if I'd turned the car off and pumped the brakes a few times. If I pull over, turn the car off and restart it, it resets to normal immediately. What is this? Can it be fixed?

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I would look for a vacuum loss somewhere first--start simple. Get a can of WD-40 and shoot small bursts of it around the vacuum hoses while the engine is running. Listen for changes in the idle as you this. I doubt that you will find anything severe enough to cause your problem, but it's worth the few minutes it will take.

It is more likely that you have some engine condition, possibly a knock that the knock sensor is picking up, so it retards the timing to the point that the engine runs so poorly that it doesn't produce vacuum--which is why the engine shakes and brake pedal gets hard. Are you using cheap gas? Try Super and see if your problem goes away. If that doesn't cure it, get it into a mechanic and let them troubleshoot it and tell you how much to fix. If it's more than the car is worth, don't fix it.