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Engine cuts power and PATS light come on

What condition are the O2 sensors in? You say it only happens once the engine is warm.. Could that be a cause?
 
I have no clue Kenny. I really don't even know what the hell an O2 sensor does really. I'm not getting any codes for O2's though, and from what I've read, they through codes pretty easily when they fail. Also, I'm not experiencing a slight loss of performance or anything- the car is straight up saying :censored::censored::censored::censored: you and trying to turn itself off. I just wish I knew what was wrong so I could fix it. I really don't even care what it will cost at this point, I just want to fix it. I'm going to take my other SVT back to school this weekend so I at least have something to drive me to the parts store...
 
This post may or may not help.

My SVT was doing almost the exact same thing about 3 weeks ago. Car would lose power like the key was turned off then after that happened a few times it chaged to the car cutting off and on within a split second and the security light would come on for a brief second or 2 and keep going.
I have a stock 2.5 with some mileage.

The overall outcome of the situation was a contact problem in the PDB. I would definitely check there cuz it does sound similar to the problem I had. There is also a possibility of a loose ground somewhere too, especially driving hard and a 3L. I'm not sure if this helps but it sounded way too familiar to me. Let me know what the verdict is, I am interested.
 
Power Distrubution Block (fuse/relay) under the hood.
When my car died I would usually have to open it and play with the relays and it would start up again, other times it would crank right up.

I suggest to idle the car and see if you can recreate the problem in idle from the box just to narrow the possibilities. It does sound identical to mine. I actually opened the panel that has the headlamps and fuel pump relays and that has cured the problem. How, I don't know because everything was clean but a small contact problem can cause some funky things to happen. It sounds electrical to me no matter what. If it's the PATS system I don't know what to tell you but after the experience I had with mine, do simple tests. Push and pull on wires and relays and unclip the PDB from its resting place and look inside from underneath it, this will also give you and idea. Green=Corrosion although mine had no sign of that either.

Electrical problems suck.
 
Rob if we meet up this weekend maybe we can dink around and see if we can fix it. I'm half way decent with engine electrical.
 
when you did your swap did you relocate your battery or no. i had this problem all the time ehile driving until one day the PATS light stayed on and the car wound not start just crank. check the three black wires to your negative terminal. at least i believe there are three. corrision can cause pats to activate then deactivate when you drive because the motion could jar the wires just enough to have it activate then from bogging it could jar the wires back to make a good ground. check these grounds and replace anything that looks bad. i relocated my battery to the trunk and seperated these 3 wires and grounds each indivually to the frame. i had a bad connection from corrision about 3 months later and it became a no start situation, but if you left your battery up front then you wouldnt have much corrision issues. there is one of these grounds that goes under your fuse box and id check that one out first. its gotta be a ground issue because it sounds like what i went through to the T.
 
I didn't do the swap. The battery is still under the hood. The three ground wires are tight. Here's a little update- I reconnected everything that I had disconnected (TPS & DPFE), tested the power at the TPS connector, tested the battery (14.43 volts when idling). I also looked at fuse box again. The wires look fine, but there are three different colored wires under the box that are tight and look like they are taped together. It was kind of dark, so I couldn't really tell, but when I pulled up on the box, it seemed like the wire was either pulling through from below, or the electrical tape was just stretching and nothing was attached... Also, when I first got the car, it had a loose body ground which I thought was attached to my passenger side fender on my other one, so I reconnected it last week when I did the CAI, or about when the problems really started to be bad. I disconnected it again last night and shoved the connection down in the weather stripping on the cowl by the cabin air filter. I drove the car around on city streets in low gear and had no problem going above 4K several times. I decided to go get some gas, so I pulled out on the main road and floored it, inducing tire spinning and wheel hop. That made it kick off. I got gas, went back by my apartment, and down to an abandoned street. I drove around in second and down shifted to first and the jolt from down shifting make it cut out again. It sounds like a loose wire somewhere, but I still don't have a clue where to start looking.
 
TX00SVT said:
I didn't do the swap. The battery is still under the hood. The three ground wires are tight. Here's a little update- I reconnected everything that I had disconnected (TPS & DPFE), tested the power at the TPS connector, tested the battery (14.43 volts when idling). I also looked at fuse box again. The wires look fine, but there are three different colored wires under the box that are tight and look like they are taped together. It was kind of dark, so I couldn't really tell, but when I pulled up on the box, it seemed like the wire was either pulling through from below, or the electrical tape was just stretching and nothing was attached... Also, when I first got the car, it had a loose body ground which I thought was attached to my passenger side fender on my other one, so I reconnected it last week when I did the CAI, or about when the problems really started to be bad. I disconnected it again last night and shoved the connection down in the weather stripping on the cowl by the cabin air filter. I drove the car around on city streets in low gear and had no problem going above 4K several times. I decided to go get some gas, so I pulled out on the main road and floored it, inducing tire spinning and wheel hop. That made it kick off. I got gas, went back by my apartment, and down to an abandoned street. I drove around in second and down shifted to first and the jolt from down shifting make it cut out again. It sounds like a loose wire somewhere, but I still don't have a clue where to start looking.
Click to expand...

Thats pretty interesting, it cuts at high revs and it has a different engine in it... I am just going to throw some ideas out there, wiring problems suck if I didnt mention this before. Was anything fabricated during the swap? Extended wires, new sensors or switches? Are there any wires close to anything that moves under torque (i.e. motor mount)?
No matter what it's going to take time to find or money for someone else to find. I have heard people tell me that the PDB can cause some funky problems from time to time and I have experienced it, double check in some light, other than that, you got a project on your hands with the whole "needle in the haystack" moral to it.
 
Again, I didn't do the swap, so I don't know if any electrical parts were fabricated, but I don't THINK so...


Here's a thought I had- the problems seemed to get really bad after I cleaned and re-oiled my big K&N air filter. Seeing as I had never done it before, I made sure that I got PLENTY of oil on the thing, to the point where it literally sat and oozed red oil for the entire next day. Since I've heard of oiled filters (particularly K&N) doing damage, and mine was dripping with oil, I'm thinking that maybe I killed my MAF. What are the symptoms of a dead MAF? Of course, as usual, I have no check engine light...
 
hesitation and idle problems, etc.


unplug the maf.. the symptoms of a dead maf will go away because the PCM reverts to a stored table instead.

Symptoms do NOT include cutting power to injectors, dash, pats or ignition..
 
Your problem sounds similar to the one i am still (after 2 weeks) experiencing. Although instead of dying, my car would surge and the rpms would jump back and forth rapidly between 2k and 4k (if i was cruising at 3k). I've inspected my tps wires and found nothing wrong, replaced my tps, still had the problem, and now i am in the process of removing the engines wiring harness to inspect it. So far, all I've seen that is bad is the single wire that runs to the alternator. It had a bend in it and the copper wire was exposed. But...still searching...
 
I believe that the symptoms the OP is having (as well as the ones I had in the past) were the same as yours, posthuman.. When he says "dies" he means it.. it DOES die, for a SPLIT second.. all power seems to go away from the injectors, fuel pump, even the tach dives towards 0 like it lost power and the CEL "VERY!!!!!" faintly flickers one split millisecond.. so fast its hard to see in daylight.

then, almost instantly, it "revives" like you just "pulsed" the battery power away and back... tach instantly climbs back towards where it should, PATS light illuminates and does a self test, car regains power/ability to accelerate.

It repeats this off/on procedure once for each and every "hiccup" you see... if the hiccups are once every hour, it dies, and regains once each. However, as my symptoms got progressively worse it would do it every half second or less for upwards of 1 or 2 minutes straight. This made the car sound like it was choking on something (imagine bad gas or a fouled carb, etc.. repetitively dying and regaining every half second) as well as the APPEARANCE that the PATS light was "staying on" and the CEL was "on but faint" (which was actually being pulsed on/off VERY fast so it looked "on but faint") and the tach would just bounce around from wherever the revs where at the time and towards 0.
 
I had this same problem and it turned out to be a ground issue. The cable that came from my starter and a couple other cables that ground to the negative battery terminal instead were all grouped into a piece of speaker wire and then just stuck into the battery cable terminal. Needless to say the ground to all of these components were all terrible. I soldered them all together and grounded them to the chassis and haven't had the symptoms you describe in over a year. i pray that it never comes back... it was so annoying... With mine though it would stall out the motor, but everyting els electrical would still work. I would try to start it back up and would get nothing... no click, nothing. It would take hours sometimes to get it to start.
 
I thought my problem was rare, I did so many searches on it and found nothing and yet now, so many people really do/did have the same problems and all had different causes. It's good that we are all coming together on this topic because it is going to save somebody a lot of this :mad:, this :censored:, some of this :bah:, going through this :blackeye:, needing :help:, more of this :confused: and the possible outcome of this :nonono:.

I got lucky and was quick to narrow it down to my PDB and it had no signs of failure, none. But I haven't had the problem come back since and I put over 1000 miles in 2 weeks.
 
Todd- I looked at the wiring and it looked to be in good shape, but I did not thoroughly inspect it. Pm me if you want to check it out sometime when I'm in GR for a little $$$.

I contacted the previous owners and one of them mentioned that the IMRC motor likes to pop out of gear. A bad IMRC had occured to me since it is dies right around 3700 on acceleration, but I kind of ruled it out when it had problems below that at constant speed and the fact that it lost power so violently. I checked under that plate and there was a rolled piece of duct tape that I assume was meant to hold the motor in place. I made up some of my own filler and cranked the plate back down and plugged the TPS back in. It ran great for about 20-25 minutes on city streets going past 3700 a lot. Then, it started to die again at 3700ish, so I went back to my apartment and pulled the plate back off, to find that the motor had rolled itself causing the new filler wad to move, and when I pulled the plate off, I could hear the gears grind and move like they hadn't made it back to full closed position. Well, I filled that hole damn side of the box up with stuff to try hold the motor in place and we will see later if this was the problem. It did seem like the car didn't have the power that it did before when it would let me go above 3700 lately, which would be explained by a bad IMRC. It would also make sense because at one point, it was dying when the car would suffer a jolt, like down shifting a gear and getting on it, which I think would jostle the gear out of position. I just can't figure the whole violently dying part and having trouble below 3700 as well. Maybe the fault screwed up the computer because the secondaries were open too low, and also not open high where they should be? I just hope that it is finally fixed.
 
You know... when I was looking for the culprit I acutally undid my PDB and lifted it up to inspect the wiring and I heard an electrical "pop" (like.. negative/positive touching pop)..

I had a few bad wires underneath the PDB going in to the bottom of it, but you could see it from the outside.. I had to remove the fuse/realy floor from the PDB box and see without the surrounding "box" in the way..
 
I had an IMRC die when it got too hot. It had to be really warm though. You have a PATS light and other things though so I doubt it's that. Some one on the forums here completely rebuilt the underhood box I recall to fix and issue. Took quite a lot of work.
 
Well, here's the news- I went over to starjammir's and he helped me datalog the car, as well as check some things out. The TPS tests good, and we took the PDB apart, which looks clean inside and out. We checked the grounds in the engine compartment minus the ones under the battery which were seemed tight by pulling on them. The IMRC box does get REALLY hot, but it shows that it is working while datalogging.

Well, we took the car out for a test drive with livelink running and of course it wanted to run fine (found out I my motor knocks and pulls 6 degrees of timing at 3000), but after a few miles, I got it to kick off. When it did, my laptop completely lost connection with the car, telling us that the PCM had died or lost power. It's weird though, because ALWAYS runs fine then kills the computer at ~3800 rpm on acceleration, not like the computer is just plain completely dead or a loose wire contacts here and there. I swear these cars are built to be able to limp along forever, because it was the same way with my fuel pump in the other one. When it starts acting up, I could stick the clutch in and give it gas, causing it to rev to 3800, die, and backfire. On the way home I just took it easy, kept it under 3500, and had no problems. Once I got off the highway, it started dying again at 3800 even when I just rev-matched and down shifted (no load) coming off of the highway, but I noticed that it is selective. If I give it anything more than just my foot resting on the pedal, it dies, BUT if I just rest my foot on the pedal and let it creep up, I can get it to 4000, floor it, and the car will pull HARD to 7000, and shifting to second will keep it above 4000, where it will still pull with full power. But anymore gas than that and it dies. I am so stumped. :confused:

Next action- I'm going to return the PCM to stock tune and put it in my 2.5 SVT to see if it gives the same results there, telling me if it really is a faulty PCM or not...(I hope). I really hope it is just a bad PCM so I can buy a new one and be done with it at this point.

Any other thoughts?
 
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