Need help!! Car broke down during road trip

[pshovest]

Keep your battery on charger. Scan for codes w/BMW capable reader.

[newb2bimmer]

Leafsrule, you need to be a bit more specific about what is the current state and what you are trying to do or check.
With the battery charged fully the truck should power up, the engine should turn and start since the alternator only start charging once the engine is actually running.
If the belt is off and the alternator it out I personally would not mess with it. You have the charging cables hanging in the engine bay, the main power cable is hopefully disconnected at the battery or in the engine bay main connection point. In this state the truck will not run.

- Was the battery charged and the alternator diagnosed to be bad after starting the truck?
- Was the alternator taken out then and you are waiting for a new one (in this case you have the cables disconnected and the truck will not run)?

[ard]

Back to something PV said...if, during a period of low voltage, the CAS has lost sync, it may inhibit starting. I think it will CRANK, but it wont START.


Use these two terms appropriately, they arent the same

[andrewwynn]

It's a fairly common situation where voltage gets too low and EWS loses sync. I dunt know why they let it crank to give you hope that's stupid. My previous cars wouldn't crank when EWS fault, also would light up something on the dash to alert me to the problem.

[leafsrule531]

I just wanted to thank everyone for their invaluable help and almost instantaneous responses as soon as my car broke down. It was a really stressful scenario since I was in a different country and no tools on me. I truly cannot thank this community enough for their support.

It ended up being the alternator. I didn’t want to go this route but I was able to get the alternator remanufactured and it works perfect now. I read a lot about how lot of these places will use cheap Chinese parts and the alternator wouldn’t last more than 15k miles which is fine. I paid $150 cad to get it remanufactured and borrowed my friend tools to put it in.

Once I get back to US - I look into putting a new one in from fcp. Unfortunately it’s pretty pricey at $600 since I have the 4 zone climate control but I’ll cross that bridge later.

Thank you everyone again!! Really appreciate it.

[ard]

well done.


At least it was in CAD, eh?

[andrewwynn]

On my e53 I used a reman from O'Reilly with lifetime warranty.

I first got bosch and had the chinesium VR fail on the second drive. They let me exchange to valeo model for the price difference of $7 and that one lasted for the duration of that car (killed by deer).

[crystalworks]

Nice work. Glad you got it sorted relatively painlessly.

Ah, road trip repairs... been there.

[haigha]

Great that you got back on the road... too bad about the Leafs though!

This is the one I got for my N62 4.4i, air-cooled:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/290786378197

Not OE, but the vendor had and has great feedback. I wasn't impressed that the original only lasted ~40k miles. Replacing the VR on the original didn't work.

[newb2bimmer]

Both ebay and amazon are known sources of counterfeit products labeled as OEM or some reputable manufacturer. I'm not saying all of them are fake but it is a hit or miss.