AUII slow/slugish acceleration from a stanstill

[dc33]

Hi all,

During the past few weeks our AUII which gets used primarily for school drop-offs and pick-ups has been playing up intermittently.

The issue with it is that (mostly as of late) when accelerating from a standstill the car is VERY sluggish and the engine labours to get up to speed but once at 40+ km/h it's ok.

The other day I drove it on the freeway and noticed the revs were a bit high for a speed of 90-100 so I started playing with the overdrive button/ gear selector by going down a gear and noticed there was no change i.e. the revs remained the same and no gear change happened. So I concluded that my 4th gear (overdrive) was not kicking in hence the high revs. Funny enough, on the return trip, the car took off rather fast and had overdrive..??? - go figure !!!

I played around with it on another occasion when it was behaving the same way, and what I did was to remove/replace the spark plug/ ignition leafs whilst the car was running - and to my surprise when I drove off the engine responded just as it should.

I have so far concluded that 1st and 4th gear are not being selected by whatever it is that tells the gearbox to select the required gear.

The problem is obviously electrical but I have no idea what it could be.

Does anyone had any similar problems and if so how was it rectified?

Cheers