my son encountered a upshifting problem on his way on a long holiday trip home this morning. at first I was worried that the trans was slipping, but now we believe it is a up shifting problem to the higher gears, it was revving very high and not shifting into the higher gears on the nys thruway, reved to almost 6000 rpm at 60mph. he called and at first I mis understood him, did all of the usual checks of fluid level and such, no burnt smell to fluid, looked good. but now as I understand it, it was not slipping, just not shifting into 3rd, or 4th gear as it should. as things would have it, he decided to try and limp off the next exit, after around half an hour shut off at the service area, and it ran fine for the 20 mile trip, any suggestions, or links to how we might diagnose the problem, I will be checking codes when I make the 2 hour trip on Saturday, but any tips or help would be appriciated

 

How many miles? When was the last time the transmission was serviced? There has to be a cel light for it not to shift.

 

It's possible that it won't throw a CEL and still won't shift. It's also possible that, due to negligence, it's lost enough power that it has to stay in 3rd to maintain speed. Properly diagnosing the transmission will require a rather special tool. I'm not at home to pull the relevant FSM pages. Hopefully RonJ has them handy. If he doesn't, I'll try to post them when I get the chance.

 

thanks guys, any help is greatly appreciated, he lives in the land of snow, buffalo ny, and I live near nyc, needless to say he encountered the problem near Utica ny, about half way. the good news was a good friend he went to school with lives in Utica and is a city fireman, and lent him his car to travel home, as he is on a 24 hour shift at the fire house, so great to have real good friends. I will be traveling up there on Saturday as I have a double shift in nyc tomorrow, so any and all help is greatly appreciated. hopefully I can pull codes with my scan gauge. just want to be as prepared as possible as its a two hour ride one way. thanks again for any and all help, enjoy your thanksgiving

 

and I just asked him twice, was he sure that the cel light did not come on during any of this, and he assured me it was one of the first things he looked for and it never came one, yet another mystery! at any rate its an old car but only has 120k on it and has been well maintained by a deceased member of the family, and go figure, I just received 4 new tires from tire rack for it as a Christmas present for him. always love how life does not follow my plan. always throwing a wrench in the works, hope its the one I need.lol, got to find the humor in it, I guess

 

Tell your son to jump the service connector to check for codes blinking from the CEL or D4 light. Click the CEL codes link in my signature.

If no codes are thrown, the best place to start is to do 3 consecutive drain-refill cycles with Honda ATF or Castrol-Import ATF. Take the car on a short drive where the transmission is cycled slowly through all the gears a few times between each drain-refill cycle. Then go from there.

 

If the auto won't shift in any gear, it has to throw a cel. It happened to me. I found out, after removing the auto, that the torque converter didn't hold any fluid whatsoever and when I drained the the tranny to prepare for removal it looked like +/- 2.5 quarts. So it looks like "known namebrand" did something wrong because after inspecting the tranny over I found that the areas that had a paper gasket looked redish like the tranny fluid. So pissed..........

 

thanks for the replys guys, and a special thanks to Ron. the drain and refill appears to have corrected the problem, he is on the five hour trip back to buffalo , ny, will update it all when he arrives. thanks again for the input

 

i had a problem with my 98 where it would just kick me in and out of gear at least that's what it felt like. The TSB for it is to locate a group of wires under the intake and tie them away with zip ties or something (what eve you have) from the bracket beside it. What happens is that the vibrations from the engine wear down the rubber/plastic coating exposing wires causing them to short out.