Ok I made a tight turn on a wet road and my car spun out causing me to do a 180 degree roation and my engine just cut off, though it restarted fine. Why did the engine cut off? I spun out about a year ago in pretty much the same scenario and the engine stayed on. Could I have damaged my car at all? Perhaps driving fast in the rain is a bad idea.
When you end up spinning 180 deg around, the engine is trying to push the wheels forward and the motion of the car is trying to spin the wheels backwards. You’ve gpt a torque converter (part of your transmission) in the middle of things, but the engine still runs slower. If the RPM of the engine gets low enough then the engine stalls out.
This puts a lot of extra strain on the entire drive train of the car. You could have broken the transmission, cv joints (if it’s front wheel drive), differential (if it’s real wheel), drive shafts, axles, or a few other parts. Most of the parts you could have broken are very expensive to fix.
There’s also the potential for hitting something while you are skidding out of control, which could do even more damage to your car, not to mention the potential damage to whoever is in the car at the time.
So, um, yeah, driving fast in the rain is not such a great idea.
But the very lack of traction that causes loss of control makes it unlikely that these components will be damaged.
Obvisiouly at the start of the spin the car had little or no traction.
At some point as the car slowed down, traction was regained. At that point if the wheels were spining backwards the engine could die from the increased load.
Since the OP gave us no clue as to year make or model, it is tough to get more specific than this.
Its a 97 toyota celica if it makes a difference.
Another possibility, (although, I believe you simply stalled it as described above) is that your car has a fuel pump shut-off, intended to stop the engine in the event of a crash, so it doesn’t just keep running, or worse, keep pumping gas into a fire.
But that wouldn’t take effect immediately - it would take a little while for the gas already in the fuel line and under pressure to be consumed.
You apparently didn’t learn the first time. Hopefully you’ll learn from the second time and not do this again. Next time, you may not be so lucky to be alone on the road.
And it would not reset itself, so that could not have been it.
Aside from the fact that I was driving fast in the rain, as the car began to skid I should have turned into the skid which may well have prevented what happened.