1990 corsica 3.1 problem

I got this car less than a week ago; it’s got about 125XXX miles on it, and its auto.


When I take off from a stop, its runs fine. Around 10 mph, it doesn’t go anywhere, the engine isn’t responding to shit, then around 15mph, it goes normal again, by the time I’m at 20 mph, it does the same thing, and back to normal, finally when I reach 30 mph, the car feels like it has no power what so ever, or as if is only got 4 cylinders. :wtf:


This happens when I have a full, half, and empty tank of fuel. I checked the transmission oil, and the engine oil, they seem to be fine. I checked the air filter, it was ok, but some how, oil is leaking from the throttle body, into the air filter box, and it was creating a little puddle of oil. I cleaned that up, and the problem is still there.

Also, when I'm in cruise control around 55mph, the CEL comes on, I stop cursing, and it goes off. Any one got any ideas?

Could be anything from EGR valve to O2 sensor, or a lot of other items. best place to start is in getting the trouble codes stored when your CEL comes on. You may have 1,2 or more codes stored. Then you can at least start tracing possible problems. A 90 is OBDI so you may have to buy a (cheap) plug in tester at Advance or Autozone to get the codes read. These places will check the codes for you but most only check OBDII computers anymore(95 and newer). you might check though, just in case. You most likely have a sensor on the blink. As for the oil, an engine with a lot of miles has some blow back and smoke / oil is sucked into the throttle body via your pcv valve. Not much you can do about that...