01 Suburban sometimes sluggish & guages going out

I'm not certain what's going on and would love some advice on this one. Occasionally when I start my Suburban, the guages won't read. I turn it off and after a few more tries they're working, but then when I shift into drive the tran doesn't seem to engage, and I would almost have to floor it to get up the small incline into my garage. Restart a few more times and that clears up. Now the Service Engine Soon light has come on. Any thoughts on what may be going on? Before I attempt to fix this myself, I want to at least know where I'm going or whether I should just take it to the dealer.

I'm not certain what's going on and would love some advice on this one. Occasionally when I start my Suburban, the guages won't read. I turn it off and after a few more tries they're working, but then when I shift into drive the tran doesn't seem to engage, and I would almost have to floor it to get up the small incline into my garage. Restart a few more times and that clears up. Now the Service Engine Soon light has come on. Any thoughts on what may be going on? Before I attempt to fix this myself, I want to at least know where I'm going or whether I should just take it to the dealer.
Welcome to AF, get the code and post back the results, but I suspect a bad ign switch here based on symptoms.

My brother-in-law had the same symptoms on his '96 Tahoe. It would only run in 3rd gear (even if the selector was in 1st) and some of the cluster was out. It was intermittent and sometimes everything worked fine, other times the problem was there.

We bought a full shop manual set and looked at the electrical schematic and found out that the transmission and some of the instrument cluster were on 1 pole out of several on the ignition switch which was not making contact. Replacing the ignition switched fixed the problem. You should be able to find the fuse that controls the transmission solenoids, use a penlight and see if you have any power to the transmission when this happens.

-Ed