I have a 91 240 sedan with a manual transmission. There's only 94K miles on it and the only problem I'm having is a sluggish start up. Even when I have over a half a tank of gas of premium in, the car shakes and almost wants to cut off untilI press the accelerator. I'm going on a road trip in a couple of weeks and I don't want to have any problems while out of town. Any ideas? </P>


Thanks</P>

 

A cheap and easy try would be to replace the distributor cap and rotor. Sometimes hairline carbon(?) tracks get formed between the connections on the cap. This causes the engine to run rough at idle, since weak signals are being sent to the spark plugs at the wrong times. Once up to road speed, it seems that these carbon scoring tracks are "canceled out" by the speed of the rotor and the car runs fine.

For some reason, this was such a common occurance on an '88 240 my dad owned that he actually kept a spare cap in the trunk.

Maybe this won't fix your problem, but it's under $20, will take 5 minutes to change, and a new cap and rotor never hurts!