My lovely wonderful PT Cruiser is now over 5 years old and has experienced over 60,000 miles of travel with no big problems. But just before it’s 60K mile redo — the night before in fact — it stalled out at every stop light and took what seemed like forever to restart (grind grind grind grind).
I took it in the next morning for the 60K and told the mechanic about the sudden onset of the stallouts. He nodded and said that it had been a hot evening and that some gunk in the throttle housing must have gotten more liquid and then stopped up some of the throttle intake. He added that to the list.
For a few days the car and I were fine. Then last Tuesday evening, after very good and very normal performance, the car stalled at a light again and took almost 5 minutes to restart.
On the way home, it stalled regularly at stops.
I got back on the fix it list.
The car worked fine.
Today I took the car in and in a few minutes it was back out. What happened? The mechanic said that there was a tech bulletin that described a similar problem. The fix was to download some new firmware into the onboard computer. So far so good.