Runaway car-BMW Emulates Audi?

[Bmmerpilot@xxxxxxx]

This happened to me, coincidentally on an '89 325i, which I had purchased 
used several weeks before. I had "known" the car for years, changed the oil 
and did the brakes for the owner, a woman who worked for me. 

Driving uphill at about 1/3 throttle it suddenly just took off- scared the 
p*** out of me, but I put in the clutch, threw it out of gear and turned off 
the ignition. The revs got pretty high...

 I figured it as a cruise control problem, so I disconnected the cruise 
control cable, made sure everything else worked freely, restarted it, no more 
problems. Two days later I was idling at a stoplight near home, when it 
started running very rough. To make a long story short, I found some sort of 
plastic and metal debris holding one of the valves open. 

The previous owner had the timing belt changed fairly recently, I fugure they 
left something in the intake tract, where it probably languished until I 
drove it at higher RPM than she did, eventually pulling it into the throttle 
butterfly. Presto- unintended acceleration.

George W. Traminer

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