When I purchased my fourth gen the original owner was telling me I needed to press the trunk release twice in order to actually open it. You pop it once and kind of lift the lid a little and then pop it again to actually get it to fully release. He acted like it was always like that. Is that how it actually worked or are the trunk lifts just weak?

 

Do a search for trunk spring mod. Essentially the spring tied to the latch mechanism loosens over time. You can pretty much go to Lowe's and buy a second spring and return it to stock functionality

 

Great, thanks for the info. The lifts seem okay so I didn't think that was it.

 

Not sure what year you have, but the spring mod won't work on a '98 as the latch mechanism is different. It does usually help with this condition on the '99+ cars, but often times the hatch shocks are also somewhat weak which exaggerates the problem.

 

It's a 2000. I'll give the spring trick a try first and if that doesn't completely solve it I'll swap the lifts out. Thanks

 

Mine has this issue from time to time as well

 

What's the remedy for 98's?

 

1999-2002 fix:

http://installuniversity.com/install...ease_fix_2.htm

 

I swapped the assembly off of a 99-02 into my 93 and put the extra spring on. Works great!

 

As mentioned above, I think the only "upgrade" you can do is swap to a '99+ setup and then add the spring.

My '98 actually doesn't have this problem at all, even with 20 year old hatch shocks, so I haven't messed with it.

On my '02 car, the spring fix worked for quite a while but then as the shocks got older it started having the same problem again.