Recently bought used '96 850 Turbo Automatic Transmission 87K miles.

In mornings, before the car warms up, the car will not shift out of 1st gear when put in the drive position. To hurry the process up, I typically manually shift from D to 3rd, and back to D. Often times in 3rd, the car won't shift back to 1st, so I put the car in D to restart the process. It may take as much as 2 or 3 cycles of this to engage a normal shift process from the drive position.

For a while, I would start the car, then shut it off, thinking that it may "reset" some switch that would allow the car to shift properly. Every time that I tried this the car would not restart immediately. It would act like the battery was totally dead for a period of 5-10 minutes. After that, the car starts fine, and even if cold will shift smoothly through all gears in the drive position.


This problem has become worse as the weather has gotten colder. As far as I can tell, the ATF fluid may have never been changed. I am probably going to take it to the shop to have them power flush the transmission, but don't know if that will fix this problem.

Any advice on this problem is greatly appreciated.

Thank You
Ken