Today I went to look at a 1994 pickup with a 22RE that was for sale. When I took the truck for a test drive, the engine kept hesitating and cutting out when I was driving, especially when the engine was under a little bit of a load. It felt like someone was turning the key off and on every few seconds. The engine would hesitate for just an instant and then start right back up again. The funny thing was that it idled pretty smoothly, and the problem only occurred when I was driving. What would make an engine do this? I've never seen anything like this before. I ended up not buying the truck, since it had a number of other red flags, but I'm curious what the problem was. I didn't see anything obviously wrong under the hood.

 

sounds like its fuel related

 

A possible cause could be a faulty throttle position sensor. There are 3 basic settings, idle, partial throttle and full throttle. Mine had a failure at partial throttle. Truck idled perfect, ran decent at full throttle, but at partial throttle nearly fell on its face. Easy enough part to replace, but does require a few minutes with a resistance meter to calibrate.

 

my 4runner had a simmilar issue and it was the throttle position sensor like crashnburn said, it wasnt shot just needed messing with to fix