My Nissan Brake & Battery Lites Keep Re-Appearing!

My 94 Nissan w/122k miles gets serviced regularly and the mechanic can’t figure out why my brake and battery lights keep coming back on & off ! It scares me and I’m hoping for the answer.

The alternator isn’t charging properly.

Yep!

And if your mechanic can’t figure that out…

I will relay this to the mechanic. This mechanic has always been very dependable (3 years). I am so grateful for that information. It is a pretty new battery in there and the only other thing was that the radio has a lot of trouble getting good reception on a lot of stations. Thank you very much.

I just called the mechanic and he said to bring the car in and he’ll check it. I live on a really micro-budget so this kind of thing is always major to me, but I read all the comments of other 94 Nissan owners in the cartalk survey and I’m encouraged that this won’t be so horrendous.

That combination of warning lights is almost always an indication that the alternator is about to die. Rather than getting stranded on a cold night, I would suggest that you give this clue to your mechanic (who should be aware of this information!), and have him check the alternator.

That is more on the money - to get it in right away as I do not want to be stuck in NYC or the outer berbs. (My only guess had been electrical wiring problem as the radio doesn’t work so well)…I appreciate what you said.

Alternator brushes are intermittent because they’re almost worn out. They’re pretty cheap, but the difficulty is finding someone willing to just change the brushes instead of the whole alternator. This almost always happens around 100K miles.