I have owned my 2001 XKR for a little over a month. During the month I have encounter two odd failures:

The first failure was about two weeks ago, while driving on the freeway doing around 70-80 mph at a constant speed, I felt the car start slowing down. As I looked down at the dash I found that the car was acting as if it was in neutral. The engine was still running and would rev but nothing was being passed into the transmission. I tried manually selecting selecting 4th in the gear shifter and still no engagement. While still coasting I put the car in neutral and restated and still the transmission would not engage. I coasted to the side of the road, placed the car in park, shut it off, then restarted and all was well.

Yesterday while on the freeway once again I felt the loss of power, looked down and saw this time the engine had shut down. Again I restarted while coasting and once again the transmission acted like it was still in neutral. Pulled over again, verified that the car would not work in any gear. Put it in park, shut down, waited a minute, and restarted and all is well again.

I was wondering if anyone else has previously seen issues such as this and what they found? I plan on buying a code reader to see if there are any store failure codes. However never during any of these two incidents did the message center display any type of faults. Thank you for your help.

 

Very strange, and unsafe indeed! There still may be a code stored in the computer, and i would keep your camera w/ video setting ready to go next time this happens, record all of the data on the dashboard, shifter, etc... then show it to your dealer. I wouldn't even venture a guess as to what is causing this. I want to say transmission...but that's a stab in the dark.

 

In reply to pjanczuk

Your paragraph one is identical to the problem we had a couple of years back. Cleaning of the throttle body and MAF didn't help. After adding 20 or 30 years to my life because of losing power to the wheels in traffic, I went to the dealer and they diagnosed it as a bad throttle body. A new one was installed and we haven't had that problem since.

Your paragraph two problem most probably will be corrected with a new throttle body. However, they are expensive, so have it thoroughly diagnosed first.

If I remember correctly the message center showed "transmission fault" and another one which escapes me.

Good luck with this........

 

Thank you for the replies! I am definitely going to try and see if there are any codes are still stored in the computer. Also thanks for the throttle body info. I will also start researching possible throttle bodies problems on the internet tomorrow. At least that gives me a direction to start in, at a minimum at least I should learn something new. I can only guess that there is some software that is putting the transmission into a safe mode because it detects some other issue. Thanks I will post if I find out more.