92 Buick Riviera shutting down off and on

[pegsueks]

Has anyone else experienced a problem when the weather is say 70+ degrees outside and you've been driving the car for a while - say a 20 min trip driving 70 mphs and when you get to where you're going and shut the car off and then maybe an hour later get it in and start driving down the road it shuts down? Wait five minutes and it'll start up again and you go a little further and it'll shut down again. It may do this a couple of times and then after that be just fine and you could drive it another 20 mins at 70 mphs an hour and reach where you're going. My mechanic has no clue what the problem is.

[pegsueks]

I might add that I've noticed the temp gauge goes one notch over and then back to normal before it shuts down. When you try to start it, it turns over but just won't start. So you have to let it sit for five minutes and then it's good to go for a little ways. Like I said above, it'll do this a couple of times and then just be fine. If the temp outside is below 70 I can go back and forth 60 miles at 70 mphs per hour twice a day and run all over town and it be just fine, but when it gets warm outside then the car acts like this.

Other than that, I love my 1992 Buick Riviera with its 148,000+ miles on it and really don't want to get another car.

[diana henderson]

[
yes and I would like to know what this problem is I have a 1992 Riveria also.

[plathegame]

Originally Posted by diana henderson

[
yes and I would like to know what this problem is I have a 1992 Riveria also.

sound like the engine coolant temperature sensor is bad (the one to the ecm not the gauge) had the same problem w/ my 86 trans am years ago

[Jake48]

im trying to understand how all these damn new-fangled sensor thingies inter-relate to what happens to the engine, and i agree about the temp sensor looking good as the cause here...

but why not the intake air temp sensor instead of the engine sensor...?

and i couldnt swear the '92 riv is set up the same way, but i had a similar set of symptoms a while back on an olds cutlass...

after weeks of stopping after 20 minutes or so, and then running fine again for another 20 minutes after a period of 'rest', and after lots of wasted time and $$ on bad 'expert' guesses, it turned out to be a fuel filter inside the gas tank that looked ok, but was in fact just slightly off-color...

and it was enuff to create some sort of fuel 'vapor lock' condition (closed fibers maybe..?) that totally shut down the engine every 20 minutes or so for a rest when it was warm...