For the second time now, I’ve experienced a stuck throttle in our work van. Basically after some form of hard accelleration the throttle gets stuck on a peice of plastic that’s on the engine cover.
Let me start off by saying, it’s a pretty scary ordeal. This time I wasn’t as freaked out because I knew what to do stop the vechicle. The first time it happen it was a different story.
The first time, the instinct was to apply heavy brakes, but that didn’t help, and secondly was to pop it out of gear which stops accelleration but revs the engine full bore. The third reaction, which is the best, is to just kill the engine via the key. Thats what I did today right away.
The only real problem with that one is that you lose power steering and brakes. When the throttle is stuck wide open, you’d be surprised at how much speed you gain by the time you realize whats going on and time it takes to turn the engine off. And with no power brakes it takes quite awhile to completely stop.
Now on to what caused the stuck throttle. Same as the first time, the pedal got stuck on a peice of plastic. The first time I had to break the plastic to get the pedal unstuck. I also broke off more that I thought could cause any future problems. Boy was I wrong. Today I cut the whole damn peice that was hanging out of there.
I need to see if there are any recalls for this highly dangerous problem, even though I feel confident that I eliminated any further problems.