Last week, while driving home about 100 miles from a job site, a couple times I heard a short "whistle" type of sound. It was kind of random, but it seemed to occur mainly when I was rolling along in slower traffic. I hadn't noticed it on the highway, but did hear it 2-3 times when I got into stop and go traffic on local roads. At the time, since we had just done some major repairs on the cooling system, I was afraid maybe the car was overheating and pressure was bring released from the cooling system. It almost had that kind of sound like steam escaping from a pressurized relief. Got out my Torque app on my phone and it turned out the coolant temp was fine as well as the oil temp, so I was confused, but relieved.
A few days after first noticing the random sound initially, it had now turned into a more regular occurance, except now it was more of a whining type of sound that increased in pitch as I would accelerate, especially in 1st and 2nd gears. As soon as the car shifted, it would drop in pitch and then climb again as I continued to accelerate. Letting off the throttle briefly would sometimes make it go away completely. It didn't happen every time I started from a dead stop, but it seemed to be becoming more frequent. When decelerating, the same thing happened in reverse; the pitch would drop as the car slowed. It scared me a couple times because it sounded almost exactly like the siren on an emergency vehicle winding down. During the several days this was going on, the car drove and shifted perfectly normally and there were no warning lights on the dash. There was just the noise. It didn't happen in reverse and it only happened when the engine was under load.
This past weekend we decided to do a complete transmission flush to see if that would help matters. 12 quarts later, the ATF fluid is now clean, but the noise is still there, unfortunately. I almost hesitated to do the flush at all because my old 1800ES had an automatic when I bought it. It was the original transmission and had over 211,000 miles on it. We thought we'd do it a favor by changing the fluid and filter. The damn thing died within a month after we did that. I still wonder if it would have kept going if we had just left it alone! But anyway...
Finally, while I was driving home from work today, the car entered into limp mode. A couple miles after I left the office, the transmission light (arrow) on the dash started flashing, the check engine light came on, and I noticed the car was now starting from a stop in a higher gear. Then a couple miles from home, just to add to the already festive display on the dashboard, the "Tracs off" and ABS lights also lit up. I've had the Tracs and ABS lights do that before even when the transmission was working fine, so I'm pretty sure the ABS module is having issues, but that's the least of my worries right now.
The Torque app on my phone, which has read some fault codes on the car before, was registering nothing at all today despite the fact that all those warning lights were on. Before anyone says it, I've already started looking for a better code reader for the future.
My question of the day, if anyone can answer it without me having any codes to offer up, is would it be a safe bet that this could be the S1 and S2 solenoids and/or the PNP switch? I would gladly spend the money for all three if it will finally get this car to a point that I can rely on it. I need to get the 850 back on the road ASAP as it was supposed to be taking the burden of commuting off my beloved MINI, which is currently overdue for some 100K maintenance of it's own. Last thing i need is for her to start getting cranky too!
