QuestionAs stated in the subject, my 01 Elantra dies occasionally. Sometimes 2 or 3 times on just a 30 minute drive. About 5 minutes later the car will start up and run till it dies again. Here is what I have done so far. My first assumption was the fuel pump, I changed that and the filter, no help at all. Then I thought, the coil pack might be getting hot and failing, changed that next. I checked the tank for water while there, none present. I have connected indicator lights to the fuel pump relay, signal was not lost then next time the car died. Then I installed a test port for fuel pressure and temporarily mounted the pressure gauge by the wipers so I could watch it while driving, never lost pressure when the car died and maintained pressure during the attempted restart. The car does try to start, it just won't. I put test lights (not noid lights, that's next though) on the injectors to see if there was a loss in 12V at the injectors. Engine still dies and no loss of 12V at the injectors. I'm still leaning towards the ECM but would like to find out for sure. OH, and I have taken the car to the Hyundai dealer and paid $95 an hour for diagnostics, only to be told they couldn't find anything wrong. They were on the car for over 3 hours, sometimes as many as 3 mechanics. the car died on them twice but no codes came up that were abnormal. They said there were certain codes that come up anytime the engine dies. All had to do with the EVAP system, which was tested as well and found to be OK. At least they were nice enough to only charge me for one hour, even though they were no help. Has anyone else had any similar problems?
AnswerI might suspect the crank sensor, as it sometimes has a habit of failing when hot and then working normally again when cold. But, crank sensor failures are often accompanied by trouble codes indicating the failure. The fact that you have none is troublesome.
If you know them, follow up with the evaporative trouble codes. It's a longshot, but there may be some electrical issue which causes these codes along with the stalling. If I know what the codes are, I may be able to examine the potential causes and come up with something.
Be advised, however, that I expect it'll be very difficult for me to determine the issue over the internet. Typically, problems such as this require testing at the time the problem is occurring. The fact that the dealer was able to recreate the issue twice but never find the issue already leads me to believe that this will be a difficult problem to find.
