Hey guys,

I'm knew to this board but I figured I would jump right in. I just bought a 99 legacy 2.5 GT Limited, 117,000 mi. This was a fun car to drive until a week later the check engine light came on and everything went wrong. I noticed just after I bought it the speedo would randomly drop to zero. No big deal would get to it when time permits. But when I took it to a local repair shop they check the codes and said it was my knock sensor. They wanted another $160 to put one in on top of diagnostics cost. So I told them to wait until I could order the part myself. So I left the shop with car not repaired. Drove about a block and immediatly noticed that it would slam from gear to gear,(AT by the way). So I went back and they told me that the car just needed to relearn its shift points. When I had a friend pull the codes again for me it came up with faulty ECU. Three days go by and still shifting hard. So I went back and they told me there was nothing they could possibly have done to cause this to happen. So today I took it to the Subaru dealership. It will cost another $65 to hook it to the computer. Now they tell me it is my vehicle speed sensor and it will cost $434 parts and labor and may not fix the problem. I love the car but It's slowly costing me a bundle to repair things. So if any of you have some advice for me I'm open to hear it. Thanks

I agree with the shop. From your description it sounds like the vehicle speed sensor is the problem. You may have a bad knock sensor also as they can fail. Hopefully that will be all you need to get going again.

Sounds really bad!

 

I have 98 GT, and my speedo is intermittent. From what I understand on there are two speed sensors on the transmission.

 

At one point my speedo did not hookup for a few miles, and that threw me a CEL. I drove home, using rpms to work out how fast I was travelling. Did an ECU reset and cleared the CEL.

 

I find that my cruise control doesn't work when my speedo is out, and that this usually only happens in colder weather.

 

I should also say that my auto tranny shifts fine even without the speedo...

I didn't mention it in my original post but I have seen no corrolation between the bad shifting and the speedo working or not. The cruise control works fine so that must be on a different sensor than the one for the speedo. One other thing I was wondering. I bought a new knock sensor for this car and when I pulled the old one it read 570k ohms, the new one read 1.5 Meg ohms. Does anyone know they correct spec for this. I did not install the new one since the connector did not match up correctly either.

Hi just rebuilt 99 Engine. Think I Have a Knock sensor Lying arround The engines Changed in 99 I Have the Early Model so if you Check the plate should tell Engine Type

 

I didn't mention it in my original post but I have seen no corrolation between the bad shifting and the speedo working or not. The cruise control works fine so that must be on a different sensor than the one for the speedo. One other thing I was wondering. I bought a new knock sensor for this car and when I pulled the old one it read 570k ohms, the new one read 1.5 Meg ohms. Does anyone know they correct spec for this. I did not install the new one since the connector did not match up correctly either.

The 570k ohm reading is about what a normal one will read from what I have seen in the past. Not sure why the new one reads so much more. The real test for these is the output signal. You can replace the sensor with a 560k resistor and fool the ECU into thinking things are normal. I did this once while waiting for a replacement sensor to keep the engine in the normal running mode.