I think my car might be stuck in failsafe/limphome mode.. please help...

I drive a 2007 Mitsubishi Galant it has 72000 miles on it and up until this problem the car has run without any issues...

it happened about a week ago... i was driving probably about 30 and my car just felt like it had died and the check engine light came on... of course the first thing i did was check my gauges to make sure i didnt run out of gas or over heat... but everything seemed fine there.. and i step on the gas and it felt like my car was out of steam... it had no torque behind it... at first i didnt think it was going anywhere... and i rolled into a parking lot... i turned it off... started it again checked anything i could think of under the hood... everything seemed good... but my car idles high and rough at times... when i start the car is idles normal and after say 30 seconds it will just to 2500rpms, and sputters there... it will move if you hit the gas but it takes forever to get up to 30-40mph and it will not go over that... I had a friend of mine ( a mechanic) scan it to see what code comes up and it was saying that the throttle position sensor was bad... which can not be purchased, instead the whole throttle body needs to be replaced... so $919 later the same problem exists... anyone have any ideas???


the other day i had to drive it home from where it was parked and noticed that while in drive the car obviously takes off slow because i think its stuck in 3rd (failsafe) and the RMPS are limited at 1500...

how do i get it out of failsafe???

just a little update after doing a little further research tomorrow i will be testing a few things out to narrow down a few possible issues...

first thing we are going to to is reset the ecu again and see what codes it throws again just to verify... if it throws the code for the rear O2 sensor then we will start with the CAT, which in that case is probably clogged and I will be in the market for a new one... if it is the front O2 sensor then we may need to replace it and see where that goes... I am also going to make sure that the throttle position sensor is calibrated since im not positive it was done in the first place... if anyone happens to know what voltage that the TPS should read at the ECU since i cant find any info on that...

hopefully one of those is the culprit... In my opinion even though i thought that it may be in failsafe before, its a clogged Catalytic converter because that is the most logical and unfortunately the most expensive...

well if you realy want to test if its a clogged cat and you plan on replacing it anyways you could always drill a hole in it and see if it frees up any power. but your probably gonna want to replace it after this. ( or you could do what i did pull it off stick a bar in it and empty the cat but my cars also turbo so it can handle the xtra flow)

Rather than taking reiketsutsukigami's advice and drilling a hole. Give your CAT a few love taps. Some nice hard hits should free anything you have clogging it and then do some WOT on the Highway. I forget what most people use to hit the CAT, but if you search you can find more on the subject.

best thind to do is give us the codes and see what we can tell you instead of guessing I had a prob with my car and had it scanned at autozone and it came back w/ a o2 sensor code refering to bank 1 and they told me the main sensor was bad in the end the first cat was no good causeing the 2 o2 to pick up probs and threw my iac out at the same time all this happened as a result of an alt shitting the bed so get codes first then we explore.

thats a shit ton of miles on an 07. by that i'd say its the cat.
not a bad idea to check the codes. but .. if you know someone who can weld. pull the rear cat down, gut it, and see what happens.

Ok so I reset the ECU/ECM by disconnecting the battery and leaving the car in the ON position for about 45 minutes... and when i reconnected the battery the car came on like there was never a problem... it idled fine and my husband drove it a few miles round trip to the store... he said he got it up to 85 and it was working as good as new... about an hour later i was about to leave so i started the car and while it was warming up i moved my kids carseats back into my car... it was still running fine... i went into the house got my kids and when i came back out the car was idling high and all of the problems are back... the check engine light was back on so we hooked up the scanner and the code that came up was P0657 which is an issue for the ECM power supply and i cringed as i looked it up... I really hope someone might have a fix for this that wouldnt involve replacing the ECU/ECM

am i safe to assume that this would no longer be considered a catalytic converter issue since it worked fine for a little while?

Alright so it seems we found the problem... and even though everyone including me thought it was probably the CAT it was not even a mechanical part... turns out it was all electric... one of the relays was bad it just happens to have been the one for the throttle... now my car is running without any issue... and now i can move on to just the minor maintenance that it needs...

I am glad to say that my galant is my favorite toy again instead of a lawn ornament on 20's

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Originally Posted by infliction

thats a shit ton of miles on an 07. by that i'd say its the cat.
not a bad idea to check the codes. but .. if you know someone who can weld. pull the rear cat down, gut it, and see what happens.

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I know that my 07 has a lot of miles... I bought it in Jan 09 with 31k... believe it or not I have racked up all of these miles just taking my kids out and going to the doctors because I kinda live out in the middle of nowhere... I don't work so its all personal driving... and I'll be adding a second road trip from FL to MA in 3 weeks...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by xxoteartjxx

I know that my 07 has a lot of miles... I bought it in Jan 09 with 31k... believe it or not I have racked up all of these miles just taking my kids out and going to the doctors because I kinda live out in the middle of nowhere... I don't work so its all personal driving... and I'll be adding a second road trip from FL to MA in 3 weeks...

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you'll be at 100,000 miles in no time lol.. My 02 galant currently is at 152,240. I drive at least 25,000 miles a year and I love every minute of it :)

glad to hear everything is back to normal.. but now i have to see this grocery getter on 20's :)