I drive a 94 Pontiac sunbird LE, and recently I was driving up to a stop sign and just about stopped when the brake pedal went straight to the floor. I pumped the brakes a few times and they were fine again. Then the next time I started up the car the abs and parking brake lights were on, and stayed on for 4 days. Just the other day the same thing happened again. What is going on?
Holy cow. Stop driving this car before you hurt yourself & / or someone else.
You probably need a new master cylinder, although your description is vague enough that your ABS system could be acting up.
Did you happen to check the brake fluid after seeing the warning lights on?
Anyway, you obviously have a serious brake system problem. Find a good, local brake shop and have them fix it.
You can get away with driving a car with a busted tail light or with a radio that only plays a rap station. But you simply cannot drive a car with a serious brake problem.
I am not going to suggest temporary measures. This car MUST go to the shop right away.
Amen!
While some other intermittent car problems can be temporarily ignored, any symptom of brake failure must be investigated and repaired immediately.
Asking the Car Talk forum “what is going on”, rather than driving straight to a mechanic under these circumstances is the automotive equivalent of logging onto Web MD to find out if arterial bleeding is serious.
If this problem happened once, it will happen again, and the next occurrence could result in fatalities that would be your fault, Rovertskeew.
As Cigroller stated, it is very likely that your brake master cylinder is failing.
Take the car today to a competent mechanic–before something happens that could affect you for the rest of your life.
There’s a problem with the primary brake system in your vehicle and that’s what caused both the brake light and the ABS light to come on. The ABS will not function if there’s a problem with the primary brake system so it turns the light on to warn you of this.
Until it’s figured out what caused the brake pedal to sink to the floor and caused the primary brake warning light to come on, the vehicle is unsafe to drive.
Tester
I’m taking it in today. And yes, I checked the brake fluid as soon as the problem occurred and the fluid was fine. Only reason im asking the question here first is so I wasn’t spending 100 bucks just for driving the thing into the mechanic.