Tuesday, September 16th, 2014 AT 9:24 AM
My Brother recently gave my son a 1999 Saturn SL2. My brother worked on it extensively. It has multiple problems don't know if its related to each other or not. The car has problems stalling in idle most of the time. When stopping at a stop sign or light sometimes it stalls on acceleration. The egr valve is good and has had new spark plugs and wires. The coolant fan only runs when the air conditioning is on, if the a/c is off the car overheats. We have replaced the coolant temp sensor and now the gauge works but the fan still doesn't kick on without the a/c. Two months ago my son took it out and it wouldn't start which happens on occasion (not triggering the passlock system, I have another Saturn that does this). When you get in the car there are multiple things that happen when you know it will not start such as the windows won't function with the key on and dome lights do not come on, when the two of these happen we know it isn't going to start and it doesn't. If we let it sit a few hours or days it usually starts again. This time it hasn't started in two months. So we have it sitting in our garage and are banging our heads against the wall. Could all of these problems be related to a bad pcm? Is there a way to test the PCM? I cannot afford to spend a ton of money on this car but on the other hand my son just had a new $350 exhaust system put on this car along with a coolant sensor and fuel filter and my brother put a ton of work into it too and we hate to scrap it after my son has spent $500 of his own money on the car and he just started college.