....and recovery.

On my way home...Stopped at a light. Car "bucks". Feels like the engine died & restarted itself, within 1 rpm. Does it twice. Runs fine afterwards.

Stopped to get gas a little down the road.....That pump is empty. So I get in my car to move it...

Cranks up...idles ROUGH.....Dies. Won't restart, over & over...Finally restarts, but the car SHAKES, as if running only on 1, 3, 5 & 7 or 2, 4, 6 & 8....Touch the pedal, car shakes worse.....Dies. Won't restart.

Pop the hood. All the plug wires look good, none burned.

Mess with the coil plug wires. When it did start, it felt most like bad ignition. Bad coil??? Dunno.

But it finally restarts & ran just fie the 30 min home. Went out & tried to restart. Starts perfectly fine.

Now..Just before I stopped for gas, went it did that "jerk" at the red light, right afterwards, the voltage meter was reading LOW. I stopped at Autozone & it tested 13.4 volts.

Dying alternator? Could low voltage cause the car to run bad? And when the voltage output went up, that caused it to to run fine?

Any ideas?

 

Just went through something similar but when my coil went it,it went. Wouldnt restart.Ignition module?I had bad wire that didnt look bad.Also I had the intake off the front of the tpi and forgot to plug my maf sensor in.Ran about how you described even after I plugged it back in.Ended up had to dissconect the battery to clear the code.

 

Well...The car has run flawless ever since it "fixed" itself.

I did discover the Check Engine Light bulb was out, so I replaced it, but no codes.

 

Maybe you have a loose electrical connection in your charging system. There could be corrasion built up somewhere too. Some newer vehicles will die if you disconnect the battery. Some won't. I'd check that out.

Another thing is that you may have gotten some bad gas, and that's what was causing the problems.

 

I have experienced,over the years,the occasional wierd,unexplained,malfunction thing.Usualy i`d freak out and pullover.SES light may or may not come on but the engine will stumble and/or die.Then after getting home or restarting or whatever it will "fix" itself.Gremlins.Bad thing is,with my luck it would be a dying altenator or battery and wait till I`m in the middle of no where to act up again or go out.

 

I'd say the ignition module would be the first place to start, it could be starting to fail. After a cool-off period, a dying ignition module can kinda 'come back to life', only to do it again later.

As for the alternator... it may have just read low because the engine RPM dropped too low momentarily, and it just needed a few secs to recover.

 

A long shot but check your EGR valve... Mine was just a little sticky and would do a "running on half the cylinders" sorta thing too. Not likely the prob but worth a look!

M.