A few months ago, my van started jerking after about 45 minutes on the freeway. When it started jerking, the check engine light came on and the windshield wipers would come on just once. If I ignored it and kept driving, the jerking would become more frequent and violent until I pulled off the road and turned the car off, then back on. After turning it back on, everything would be normal again, sometimes until I finished my commute to work, sometimes it happened every 5-10 miles. Never any problem in town.
A few weeks later, and in addition to the previous stuff, when driving in town, the windshield wipers would come on just once when braking. That would happen a few times a day, with no check engine light and no other issues. Now, when you hit the brakes, in addition to the wipers coming on, sometimes the RPMs will drop until the engine dies. Today, it died 4 times in 10 minutes.
I’ve changed the very corroded ground strap from the block to the firewall, cleaned up the battery posts and cable connectors (dirty, but no corrosion), checked for corrosion in the wiring harness underneath the battery and I’m not finding anything. Can someone help me out here?
You have my sympathies, we chased these and many other gremlins in my dad’s 1988 Grand Voyager. Fixing the wiring harness under the battery solved one of our problems but it might be time to hand the vehicle over to a mechanic or electrical shop that you trust and let them see if they can locate what the heck’s going wrong with your van. You can understand why we only put 125,000 miles on ours in the 18 years it was in regular service, too afraid to take it too far from home. Others might have some ideas but this is where we’ve let the mechanic take a look. Might be something simple but ours was all over the map from wiring fixes to a new computer.
How old is the battery? What voltage does it read when the car is off and when running? What is the condition of the battery cables? Are they corroded under the insulation at the battery ends? Are all the ground straps clean and tight?
I don’t know how old it is, but I just had the battery, alternator and starter tested and they’re all fine, and all the grounds that I can find, except the one I replaced, are tight and in good condition. I think I’m going to give in and just let a mechanic diagnose…I hate to have to do that, but I figure if I spare myself the hassle of digging around in all the electrical connections, then I can still fix whatever the problem is after he pinpoints it.
