I have a 2009 dodge journey. Besides the brakes it has been a great car. A few months ago my car started dinging. The notification chime ( the noise it makes when say your gas light goes on) doesn’t stop. It “dings” about every 5 seconds. There is no consistency on when it starts. No constant. The only constant about this problem is, it stops when the wheels stop moving. Not step on the brake or gas, the car has to be at a complete stop. It starts immediately when the car starts to roll. It will do it everytime I drive for weeks, then for no reason will stop and not do it for a month. I am afraid to take my car on long trips for the fear of it starting to “ding”. I have tried and tried to get it diagnosed but no one can fix it or even find a reason it would be doing it. There is no notification light so they don’t know where to start. Any advise would be helpful even if it is how to cut the wire that is hooked up to this chime
Another thing that can cause dinging is if the vehicle thinks there’s a passenger in the seat without his/her seatbelt on. If you have something on the passenger seat, try removing it.
Unfortunately there are no indicator lights on at all. All of the indicator lights work. It only “dings” while I am moving so I couldn’t check them. Maybe I can have my husband pull fuses when it is happening. I don’t know what to do. I am about the sell the car. I can’t take it. I have had it checked so many times. Nothing comes up when they run the diagnostic. Any other thoughts would be great.
Is there anyone in the passenger seat when this is happening? If not try plugging in the seat belt on the passenger side. Soda in seatbelt clip can make switch flakey. You can try squirting contact cleaner in both front seat buckles.
Thanks for the comments. We have tried all of those. It happens with or without someone in the passenger. The dealer cleaned and blew out all the seat belts. Ugh!
My car is not the same make, but the only dinging I get without any signal is when the turn indicator has been left on too long while going straight. If your car has this feature try signalling one way or another and see if it stops. Changing the tilt on your steering wheel would also be another good experiment to try.
Usually those dinger modules are designed so that if you try to remove it, something else (and necessary) won’t work. They think it’s a safety thing I guess. Those car designers are a tricky bunch.
All the above comments are possibilities. If I had this problem on my Corolla I’d focus on the door switches as the most likely culprit. A faulty one could well be affected by the car’s motion. If the dinger-module thinks a door is ajar and the key is in the ignition, that will cause a ding. On the Corolla at least. And I imagine on your car too. So what I’d do – if a quick visual inspection of the door switches and wiring didn’t turn anything up --is use a jumper wire to bypass all the door switches. If that solved the ding problem, then I’d know one of the door switches was faulty. Best of luck.
Sigh. Electronics has definitely improved the functionality and safety in cars. But electronics can fail in weird, almost impossible to diagnose ways. I have two of those digital TV tuners, you probably remember, the kind where the gov’t gave you a $30 rebate coupon to buy one with the switch from analog to digital over-the-air tv. Inside, these devices are pretty complicated. But they do produce a very good picture and sound. But mine, they both have some peculiarities for sure. One of them completely turns off when I switch to channel 54.1. All the other 60 channels? They work fine. And I can tune to 54.1 if I start from 54.2. But not if I start from any other channel. And the other digital tuner? Channel 54.1 works great. But the closed captions work on every channel except on the PBS channels. On the PBS channels, the closed captions produce text where every other character is garbage.
If it works, it works great. If not, if you can’t live with it, it’s going to be tough to fix it. It’s the nature of electronics stuff I guess.
