2000 Plymouth Neon loses all electrical power.

GALLIENUS

MEMBER
2000 PLYMOUTH NEON
87,500 MILES

I bought a used 2000 Plymouth Neon with 87500 miles on it. It runs fine for the most part except that it will occasionally lose all electrical power. I'll be driving down the road or in a parking lot and my car loses all power. No lights, no radio, no gauges, no brakes, no power steering, nothing. I'll pop the hood and literally tap the battery wires near the battery a few times and jiggled the nearby fuse box and my car will start and run fine for a hundred feet or like the last time will run and is still running without issue.

This has happened a few times since I bought the car a month ago. This last time something different happened I'm not sure if it is a coincidence or not but.I was driving and I went to turn on my headlights. They came on but the check engine and seat belt light also came on on the dash when I turned the head lights off the check engine light and seat belt light went off. Later that day I was driving and I wanted to see if it would do it again so I went to turn the head lights on and the car died like it had before. This was 09/23/2013. Like before I popped the hood tapped the battery wires near the battery and jiggled the fuse box it ran for about 10 minutes before it lost all electrical power while I was driving in a parking lot. As before I popped the hood tapped the wires near the battery jiggled the fuse box and as of today 09/29/13 the car has not lost power again.

Also in the course of driving my car I would randomly turn the head lights off and on and never once did I have a recurrence of the engine and seat belt lights coming on or of the car losing power because the head lights were turned on.

1 Reply

CARADIODOC

MECHANIC
33,881 POSTS

What you're describing is becoming fairly common on a lot of car brands. Follow the smaller red positive battery wire to the under-hood fuse box. Tighten that nut. Follow the smaller black negative wire to the body and be sure that one isn't loose. 99 percent of the problems are caused by the positive wire.

You will not lose brakes or steering when this happens, but if the engine stops running, you will lose power assist to the steering right away, and you'll only get one or two power assisted brake pedal applications, then the pedal will get harder to push. If you've never experienced that before, practice in an empty parking lot turning off the engine and coasting to a stop. There's enough reserve in the power brakes to give you two power-assisted pedal applications to allow you to stop the car safely. After that you'll have to push really hard on the pedal, and it will be hard to control the brakes precisely.

The steering will still turn very easily with a stalled engine at higher speeds. The slower the car goes, the harder the steering becomes. The hardest is turning the steering wheel when the car is standing still.