I have a 1993 Colt. It's paperwork says it's a Dodge, but actually it was made by Chrysler. I own the complete service manual for it and has confirmed that it is indeed Chrysler's take on the colt.
It has been giving me some very odd problems that I can't wrap my head around: Every morning it starts fine. After about a minute of driving, and while the engine temperature is still climbing, I experience a loss of power. The engine still idles fine, and at high rpm, no load it's fine but under loads it skips. It's quite alarming because the whole car shakes when it does this and it's very hard to accelerate. But after about 5-10 minutes of putting up with this and slipping my clutch to keep the rpm's high and the load low the problem just disappears as fast as it appeared and the car drives fine for the rest of the journey.
The problem seems to occur only from cold starts, and is worsened by cold weather and even more so by wet weather. It's happened twice now that it behaved fine for 10 minutes until another car splashed rainwater all over the hood.
I don't have an idea where to start because the problem comes and it goes and it's therefore so hard to test whether my solution fixed anything. I have already used fuel injector cleaner and replaced the spark plugs, air filter and fuel filter with no effect.
Any help would be very greatly appreciated. I just need to know some more possible culprits so I can replace them all.
Thanks, Marius
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Friday, January 15th, 2010 AT 1:35 PM