My 1993 Dodge Caravan, with about 105,000 miles, stalls intermittantly, and neither the dealer or my mechanic has beeen able to figure out why. About once every few weeks, it stalls, sometimes more than once. This generally happens on the highway when it is backed up, although I should point out the the highway is frequently backed up and it doesn’t necessarily stall. The engine just dies, and I have to pull over to the shoulder or right lane and restart, sometimes more than once. Does anyone know why this could be happenning?
This is a difficult problem to solve. It’s one of those problems where whenever circuits and components are checked, no fault is found. In this situation, I advise to start changing (inexpensive) parts, and perform inexpensive maintenance.
Clean the intake tract, from the air filter through the throttle bore, with Carb/Throttle Body cleaner. Pull the idle air control valve (aic) and clean its pintle and the passage that feeds it air. Swap the ASD (Automatic Shut Down) relay with the horn relay (they’re the same). Change the fuel filter and spark plugs. If it doesn’t improve, change the ignition coil. The ignition switch is on the suspect list. It’s likely in the spark producing circuits/components; but, it could be electrical (a switch, relay, wiring, or whatchamacallit).
I like hellokit’s suggestion to swap the ASD and horn relays (at least to start with), as I had a 1990 Dodge Spirit that had a similar problem and replacing the ASD relay fixed it for me. It’s fairly easy to do this and cheap if you do it yourself. If that doesn’t make things better then proably time to start going down the rest of the list that hellokit gave you.
I have a 97 se 3.0 same mileage. It would very gently just fade away intermittently. After checking every sensor I could and replaceing the fuel filter, I found an article online from a mechanic with same trouble. I followed his fix and replaced the crank postion sensor(34 bucks) hasen’t died in the 10K miles since. I understand that’s somewhat odd, I think cps should work or not and I wasn’t getting any trouble codes. It worked for me.
The crank position switch is on the “inexpensive list”. And it has been found to cause intermittent stalls of other makes of vehicles. Oh! The MAF (Mass Air Flow) sensor isn’t on the “inexpensive list”. It’s low on the “suspects list”, also.