I drove all over yesterday then about 7pm I was missing an item for dinner and car wouldn’t start. The starter sounded fine and healthy, it just wouldn’t engage.
The battery is less than a year old but I still had a friend come by, it wouldn’t jump either. It started right up today. Went to o’reilly and the battery and alternator tested fine.
Last night it sounded like trying to start a car where everything is fine but no gas. However, it’s 3/4 full. Fuel pump, filter, battery, plugs and various other things were replaced less than a year ago.
Any ideas?
sounds like it cranks. That means your battery is fine. Intermittent problems like this one are tough to figure out, even for the professionals.
Was there a big temperature or humidity difference between last night and the morning? Did a weather front move through overnight? Perhaps something like vapor in the line affected it at night but not in the morning. How old is this car and what’s the make/model?
Of course, the most obvious thing is to check for a banana in the tailpipe.
No strange weather. It’s been dry and warm the past few weeks.
It’s an older car. 2009 Outback. Low mileage for its age in my opinion. 120,000. But I"ve been very meticulous on annual servicing and repairing everything at the first sign of going bad.
I don’t really know cars, but maybe something was flooded, and it drained overnight? Or maybe something had overheated, and then cooled down again?
Maybe the last time you got gas there was water in the fuel and it’s taken until now to pool at the exit from the tank. There is/was some junk in a silver can you can get at the auto parts store that will mix with the water and purge the H2O from your tank, but I can’t for the life of me think what it’s called.
And if this is the cause, your car will have a petit mal seizure as the water/additive is consumed/expelled.
When that happened to me, it was due to the fact that it had been about 10 years since I had replaced the spark plug wires. Replacing the spark plug wires and the distributor cap fixed the problem.
Actually selling the Chevy and buying a Honda was what really fixed the problem.
Most cars nowadays don’t have spark plug wires or distributor caps.
For the OP:
Four things are needed for combustion in a cylinder: gasoline, air, spark, and compression. So it’s a process of elimination.
Do you have an OBDII code reader? I recommend looking at diagnostic codes.
Based on the symptoms, a few things come to mind:
Intermittent fuel pump or fuel pump relay.
Intermittent crankshaft sensor.
Intermittent camshaft sensor (if so equipped).
Is there a tachometer in the dash? If so, and if this happens again, look at the tach as the engine cranks, and see if the needle moves a tiny bit.
I had a car that would sometimes shut down, even while driving, in the rain or after rain. I’m pretty sure there was frayed wiring somewhere that periodically got wet and shorted out, but it was never diagnosed. I traded it in and was very happy to see it gone.
About 10 years ago the engine speed sensor started to fail on my car, which would cause it to stall after coming to a stop. It wouldn’t restart because if the computer doesn’t know what the engine RPMs are, then it can’t control the fuel injection or anything else. After about 10 minutes the sensor would cool down or reset or whatever, then I was able to start up and get going again, but only for a couple minutes. I don’t think that’s a particularly common failure mode, but it could lead to symptoms like this.
Auto part stores will frequently test the codes for free. If you don’t have a reader yourself, take it back to the store where you had the tests done and see if they’ll read the codes.
You should probably get a code reader. Older cars always have stuff acting up. Basic code readers are pretty cheap and really easy to use.
I had a Ford Ranger that would exhibit a similar behavior. If you drove it around all afternoon, it would sometimes then not start. It would crank the engine just fine, but not fire. We had it towed several times. Every time the mechanic got around to looking at it, it would start just fine. You can’t really troubleshoot something that you can’t reproduce, so we’d just take the truck back and keep driving it until it happened again. That usually took a few weeks before it reared its ugly head again.
Finally, either my wife or I noticed that the fuel gauge would show empty when this happened, on a tank that we knew had at least half a tank in it. Luckily for us, the fuel level sending unit and the lift fuel pump were one unit on that Ranger. We replaced that part, and it never happened again. Apparently the lift pump was flaking out when it got hot. If you let it sit overnight, it cooled down and started to work again. This condition never threw any ODBII codes, of course.
I know that you said you replaced the fuel pump recently, but was it the lift pump or the injection pump that was replaced? Because if it happens again, and doesn’t throw any codes, I’d start suspecting the fuel delivery system.