I was driving home from the gym last night with the cruise control set at a leisurely 55 mph when I hear a clunk that sounded like a rock hitting the underbelly of the car. About ~ 20 seconds later, all of a sudden I hear a loud crunching noise from the front end and the car veers sharply into the left lane and slows down dramatically - all the while, making this loud crunching noise.

I get out of the car thinking I have a flat tire, but nothing is wrong. I get back in the car and try to pull it over to the shoulder on the right but it feels like I have a stuck caliper, the car won't budge unless I really give it a lot of gas. A police officer pulls over and says he heard my car coming and he thought it was a flat or maybe a stuck caliper. We inspect the car and nothing appears to be visually wrong with it. Since I live only about a 200' away I figure I can maybe nurse the car forward. However it will barely budge in Drive. So I put the car in reverse and try to back into a an elementary school parking lot. The car runs just fine in reverse.

The officer says it could be a broken CV joint but I never heard any of the clicking noise that precedes a complete failure of the joint. Is it the transmission?

fwiw the car is an '03 5 speed automatic with only ~ 68,000 miles. I figure I'll have the car towed to a dealer tomorrow morning.

 

hmm. Don't know. My friend's civic made a loud ass noise right before his axle went to shit. he wasnt able to drive forward anymore, though .I'm sure everyone has a story for every scenario.

 

How the hell does this happen with a fairly new car? Every other car I've ever owned, including some allegedly crappy domestics, never needed any repairs until it had well over 150K miles on the odometer. Plus, I drive mostly highway miles. It's not like the car has seen years of stop and go driving. And it's probably better maintained than 98% of the cars on the road.

 

Sorry to hear that bub. I hope McDavid doesn't rape you on it. I think it may be the CV since stearing was affected.

 

I'll be towing it to First Texas Honda.

 

If the car moves fine in reverse but doesn't move at all in drive, I think it's the transmission.

 

unless you have a LSD(even then I'm not sure about its power apportioning) a broken half shaft would render the car unable to move.

Mike

 

Aside from the whole "vearing to the left" part, it sounds a lot like the Transmission failure I experienced last week in my 01' CL-S. What kinda of car is it?

 

Sounds like the tranny.
More good times with Honda transmissions.

 

While waiting for the tow truck to arrive I spotted the problem and fixed it myself. One of the bolts that held the spindle caliper assembly onto the front suspension had broken off so that the top half of the caliper/spindle apparatus was resting along the inside of the left front rim. The bottom half of the spindle was still in place.

Total cost to fix: $0.58 worth of bolts from a nearby auto parts store & ~ 1.5 hour worth of my own time, mostly spent walking over to the auto parts store and back, and using the screw type jack to lift the car and remove the wheel.

I'm so glad I didn't have the car towed away last night. And kudos to Lakeway police for giving me a ride back home. It turns out I was ~ a mile away from home, not 200'.

 

Glad you were able to fix it. Wonder how the bolt broke?

 

Did you sit in the front of the cop car or the back? I've always wondered where they put non-criminal suspects.

 

The back. And it was cramped back there. Fortunately the officer opened a tiny sliding plexiglass door to let some ventilation in. I couldn't find the latch to fasten the seat belt either. And even though the door appeared to be unlocked, I couldn't open the door from the inside.

 

And although I'm sure you didn't think this, my sentence was poorly worded (might have thought that,) and I didn't mean to say you were a suspect in any which way, should have just said "person whom the officer is giving a ride home..." or something

 

Had my radiator blow in the middle of Georgia while driving to FL with my friend got a ride to local gas station from a sheriff and he put one of us in the front and the other in the back.

 

Speedy should've pretended to be one and scare the crap out of his family.
The cop car pulls up and he gets out the back with his arms behind his back.