Had to jump battery. Cables off and car ran rough, powersteering went out, dash lights went out and tach and speedometer started spinning. No owners manual.Hooked cables back up and all came back to normal. Cables off and car died. ?bad battery? What can cause all this please???
A bad alternator would be my first suspicion. All the other electrical stuff, including power steering, depends on it. My 2009 acted flaky both times the alternator failed.
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Try charging the battery up using a charger. If that works then have a shop check out the battery and charging system. You may need to replace both the alternator and the battery. If the alternator is bad and unless the battery is pretty new, I suggest you replace the battery also since they work together.
If you jump start a battery and the engine starts, and then remove the jumper cables, it can damage the alternator.
Tester
Interesting
Would not hurt to check the battery. At some point when the voltage gets low enough (say 10 or a bit less) electronics may have a tendency to shut down. Maybe checking for corrosion between the cable ends and battery terminals would also be a good idea.
How old is the battery? May not matter because any battery can go belly-up at any time. A few weeks ago on one of my vehicles a 3 year old battery would not take a charge at all. Even after being on the trickle charger all night it could only spit out 1.5 volts.
A friend of mine owns 10+ years old Toyota Matrix, which is Corolla platform IMHO.
He called me in some time ago telling that all electronics started to flash, the car would not start.
I suggested him to carefully trace ground connections, and his first report was “everything LOOKS good”, then we checked the actual voltage drop and found that the ground connection from the battery to the chassis would “normally” show more than 0.5V, but when trying to start it would jump to something like 6V.
The cable crimp into one of terminal ends was corroded INSIDE, externally looked nice and shiny.
Once cable was replaced, all the problems resolved.
Thanks. I’ll get to it this weekend