While driving my engine sometimes suddenly cuts out. There doesn’t seem to be an electrical problem, it will restart right after this happens, but it’s scary to be driving on the freeway and have the engine just cut off. My battery and cables are new, it has a new distributor cap/rotor, iginition coil is fine. I tried replacing the fuel filter. Is the fuel pump a likely candidate here? That’s a small fortune I’d prefer not to spend unless I’m absolutely certain that’s the problem! It’s a '95 Grand Cherokee 4-cylinder with about 100K miles.
Oops I meant to say it’s a 6-cylinder!
Maybe a faulty ignition switch. Could also be a faulty fuse or fusible link. Does it stumble just before stalling, or is it like a light switch, just off. I wouldn’t consider the fuel pump unless it stumbles first, as the fuel pressure drops off. If it is like a light switch, I’d suspect electrical.
Usually it’s like a light switch, but a couple of times on the freeway it would stumble, die, and then spontaneously restart without me having to pop into neutral and turn the ignition; I figured compression from the speed restarted it. My initial inclination was to suspect electrical since I had recently replaced the battery, but the shop that installed the battery instrument-tested all the connections and said they couldn’t find an electrical fault. A few times I had to retry ignition over a period of a few minutes before it would restart, which is why I then started suspecting a fuel issue and replaced the filter to no avail.
Check for fusible links, then consider replacing the ignition switch. Burnt fusible links can cause this, and so could bad or burnt contacts in the ignition switch. A burnt fusible link may look OK, but will feel rough and melted when rolled between finger and thumb.
I finally found a mechanic who solved the problem for me. It was a bad crankshaft position sensor.