Help!! Urgent!! Help Urgent!!

[Chuff]

Help!

I was driving the VP home tonight when literally 5 metres from my driveway it stopped, and when I stopped, I mean stopped.

Everything stopped. The engine. The headlights. EVERYTHING!

Absolutely nothing works anywhere.

Any opinions, 'cause I am absolutely stumped.

I've heard there is supposed to be a fusible link for the power. Could it be this and where would I find it? I would have thought it was connected pretty much directly to the positive terminal of the battery, but I can't see anything there, although I'm not exactly sure what I should be looking for.

Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

CATCH!

PS: Not Happy! :cry:

 

[koma]

Help!

I was driving the VP home tonight when literally 5 metres from my driveway it stopped, and when I stopped, I mean stopped.

Everything stopped. The engine. The headlights. EVERYTHING!

Absolutely nothing works anywhere.

Any opinions, 'cause I am absolutely stumped.

I've heard there is supposed to be a fusible link for the power. Could it be this and where would I find it? I would have thought it was connected pretty much directly to the positive terminal of the battery, but I can't see anything there, although I'm not exactly sure what I should be looking for.

Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

CATCH!

PS: Not Happy! :cry:

You're on the right track, im not a mechanic but alot of they boys here know alot more than me.
It is definatly an electrical problem, (unless your alternator is fucked) and has to do with the battery getting power to the rest of the car.
Have you driven through any water lately? It can short stuff out.
Hope you fix the problem, the blokes here know more than me.

 

[dodgy]

I've heard there is supposed to be a fusible link for the power. Could it be this and where would I find it?

YES

It could and it's located in the engine bay behind the battery near the relays, small cover, it has 5 bigger fuses in there!

 

[VTSSDUDE]

I will have to have a look, but not one fuse does all. Multiple fuses which perform different jobs. I couldn't imgine all fuses going at once. But maybe the main power going into them has come loose. Have you check the positive and negative terminals. Might pay to wiggle them a bit. Test your voltage on your battery. Does simple things like cabin light work?


Cheers,
Jim

 

[Chuff]

Fixed!

Thanks to Russel from Waterdale Auto Electrics in Melbourne. He talked me through checking all the outputs from the fusible link, which as already mentioned is behind the battery just below the fuse box.

There are four fuses in there. Pink, Green Yellow & Blue. Anyway, the yellow one is the main feed to the fuse box, and it blew. As a result, absolutely everything stopped working, and I mean everything.

It could have been much worse. The car stopped dead all a sudden just as I was about to turn into my brother's driveway at 11.30 PM last night. Five minutes earlier I was sitting on 100 kph on a dark, twisty country road, with no street lights, and if it had have blown then, and everything died the way it did, well I would have been travelling at that speed with no engine, power steering, vacuum for the brakes or lights, as I try to negotiate the tight twisty road ahead. It could have meant the end of me and my son, who was in the car with me.

I'm truly gob smacked to think that such a catastrophic failure could occur in a modern motor vehicle.

CATCH!

 

[fergi]

chuff
i carry a spare main fusable in my boot,glad you got it sorted out,last i heard you were still having probs with the power of your v8,i know you had it fixed there for a day or two but it returned again didnt it,have you since worked it out.just a thought as you have tried every thing else i once had a prob with my vp v8 and that was that it would miss a couple of beats while driving along so i pulled apart all the electrical plugs under the bonnet sprayed with a can of electrical cleaner and pushed the plugs back in and out for a few times then wiped them out again fresh blast of elect cleaner then pushed them back in firm.i did this with everything under the bonnet,hasnt happened since so could be worth considering
cheers
fergi

 

[Chuff]

chuff
i carry a spare main fusable in my boot,glad you got it sorted out,last i heard you were still having probs with the power of your v8,i know you had it fixed there for a day or two but it returned again didnt it,have you since worked it out.just a thought as you have tried every thing else i once had a prob with my vp v8 and that was that it would miss a couple of beats while driving along so i pulled apart all the electrical plugs under the bonnet sprayed with a can of electrical cleaner and pushed the plugs back in and out for a few times then wiped them out again fresh blast of elect cleaner then pushed them back in firm.i did this with everything under the bonnet,hasnt happened since so could be worth considering
cheers
fergi

Thanks fergi,

Good suggestion regarding the connectors. It's definately worth doing as Commodore connectors are known to have problems, and the car is 11 years old.

The power problems have not been sorted out yet. I have connected my laptop to the ECU and have determined that apart from the vehicle speed sensor, which plays up mainly under full throttle for some reason, every sensor seems to be working OK.

This leads me to now start thinking that obviously it is something that the ECU does not monitor, otherwise I would have found it by now. So I'm suss on the fuel system & injectors, but i don't have the neccessary equipment to correctly test these components, so nothing has been done as yet.

With the link, it blew again last night, as I drove into my brother's driveway. He lives 50 KM from me, and the fuse lasts all that way just to blow in geographically almost the exact same location, as the first fuse blew at 5 metres before the driveway. Maybe it's Martians, I have no idea.

Either way, I still don't like the fact that the power to the whole car goes through this one fuse. Poor design by Holden in my opinion.

CATCH!

 

[VTSSDUDE]

Yes, it must have been your lucky day. It always worries me in those situations whether if my lights are just going to go out.


Cheers,
Jim

 

[Jimbo]

Its unusual for those fuses to pop continually without reason,.. have you changed anything in the electrical system from standard ? Tapped into places perhaps ?

Jim.....