Today no more than an hour ago i started my car and when it turned over the rpms jumped to like four k. I thought the rpms would drop after a sec or two but they didnt. I made my peace with the fact that their was something wrong with my car but i still had to get home. To get home i started shifting to higher gears forcing the rpms to drop. I kept my eye on all the gauges to make sure i didnt over heat or anything, i was almost home when the problem became complicated. I was at a light and the rpms all of a sudden dropped down to idle at which point i thought the problem fixed itself ( how foolish and I? ) but the second the rpms hit idle they would go back up only to like 2k and drop down again then go back to 2k then drop down again so and so on. It was like i was constantly throttling again and again i made it home and now i have the idle issue. Personally i have NO IDEA whats wrong with my car maybe something with the clutch i dont know. All comments are welcome good or bad. And for the car i have a 96 Cavalier (OHV) 2.2 with around 130k.

Thank you all

Can you get the RPMs up past say 3-4k? if not it might be the Converter starting to get plugged


2003 White Cavalier LS Sport Coupe

You might check for vacuum leak issues? There might be something loose -- On my car when i did the TB swap, I forgot to reconnect the brake booster and the idle was at like 4000r's..

Best of luck to you

Tipycal of a faulty IAC valve, try cleaning it or just replace it.

Luis Baptista wrote:Tipycal of a faulty IAC valve, try cleaning it or just replace it.

Thats what I was thinking... Although it's been a while seince I had a 2200...

Fixed the problem it was actually a leak on the intake manifold. A plug came undone or something so i had to plug it back up. Thanks for all the feedback guys really appreciate it JBO rules lol

interesting... same thing happened to me with my RPMs while driving back from a crooked Pontiac dealership in South Carolina that wouldn't replace my failed Master Cylinder under warranty when it was obviously broken. (Another Pontiac Dealership replaced it without question the next day) ...these were incompetant idiots and two of the service managers tried to convince me separately that nothing was wrong with the master cylinder. I actually had to debate the safety of driving my car when he said he "can't justify" the replacement because the brakes would have to fail completely before he will replace it. He obviously didn't know that master cylinders have redundancy built in so that the brakes don't fail completely and seriously kill someone. (on the other hand, he wouldn't have to fix my car if I hit a tree at 55mph) It still makes me mad. They charged me for a brake inspection to top it off!
Back to the RPM's issue... I'm not going to say they sabatoged my car out of anger that they thought I was wasting their time... (I'm sure it was an accident...) I never knew what they did that caused the RPMs to jump up and down like that but I checked all the sensors and disconnected/reset the battery and that fixed it... this problem has never happened at any other time. I assumed it was a computer or sensor issue.