This has happened 3 or 4 times now. The car shuts itself off while being driven. The speed doesn't matter and especially not the location. It has happened in driveways, parking lots and most recently, on the highway. The car sometimes will turn back on but of course, when it happened on the highway, it wouldn't start for another 15 minutes. All power is gone, no hazard lights, no headlights, nothing. This also happened at night and it is a black car. Sometimes it will just temporarily lose power and turn itself back on, the doors unlock, the gauges are gone and the clock resets itself to 12 but the engine stays on so the car continues moving. After it turns itself back on then the automatic transmission doesn't know which gear to be in so it jumps through all of them, starting in first, until it finds the right one. This happened on the highway the other day with a semi right behind me. Long story short, this is far from safe.
Update from Nov 9, 2010: an update on my Neon. I had the ignition switch replaced, which did nothing. After going through that process, I was told that the battery was going bad. That got replaced about 2 weeks ago and there hasn't been any problems since. Hopefully this fixed the problem.
Update from Nov 23, 2010: And another update...the car shut off all power this morning multiple times. So far the battery and ignition switch have both been replaced and obviously neither of those things have solved the problem.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T S
This has happened 3 or 4 times now. The car shuts itself off while being driven. The speed doesn't matter and especially not the location. It has happened in driveways, parking lots and most recently, on the highway. The car sometimes will turn back on but of course, when it happened on the highway, it wouldn't start for another 15 minutes. All power is gone, no hazard lights, no headlights, nothing. This also happened at night and it is a black car. Sometimes it will just temporarily lose power and turn itself back on, the doors unlock, the gauges are gone and the clock resets itself to 12 but the engine stays on so the car continues moving. After it turns itself back on then the automatic transmission doesn't know which gear to be in so it jumps through all of them, starting in first, until it finds the right one. This happened on the highway the other day with a semi right behind me. Long story short, this is far from safe.
Update from Nov 9, 2010: an update on my Neon. I had the ignition switch replaced, which did nothing. After going through that process, I was told that the battery was going bad. That got replaced about 2 weeks ago and there hasn't been any problems since. Hopefully this fixed the problem.
Update from Nov 23, 2010: And another update...the car shut off all power this morning multiple times. So far the battery and ignition switch have both been replaced and obviously neither of those things have solved the problem.
- Cassie E., Wheeler, IL, US