Hi,

I have an old family car, an automatic Nissan Bluebird U13 (aka Nissan Altima in the US) built in 1994.

It had been running fine till the start of this year when all of a sudden, as I was pulling out of a parking lot, the car just shut off completely - consequently the steering wheel became very hard to turn and the brakes were very hard to depress. The immobiliser light came on, as if the car had just been locked (indicator lights light up solid green). I could not turn the car back on.

I called the RAC (roadside assistance in Australia), and they told me they thought it was the crank position sensor. I got it towed to my regular service station and the guy changed this part. The car ran for a while after this, however after a few weeks it happened again, but this time I was able to start it up again. Now it's happening much more often, it'll run ok the first time I start it up but then after I park and start it again shortly afterwards, it just switches off completely like before. The accelerator becomes unresponsive and the car just stalls.

Please help me diagnose this problem, I need my car and am keen to learn more about cars and car repairs (though I am strapped for cash so spare parts will be hard to afford and probably not worth it for such an old car). This is also quite a dangerous problem, I would not dare take this car on the freeway for now.


Thanks.

Ps,

Another important point is that the "!" light on the dashboard (which is normally associated with the handbrake) and the battery light (but this battery is quite new) would sometimes light up randomly while I was driving (well before the first stall incident) and would flicker or fade when I turned the radio volume knob (which caused heavy distortion in the speakers as well) or turned on the front lights.

Another thing to note is that a few weeks before the first incident, the car would actually not start at all. The fuel at this time was near empty, and when the RAC came they injected fuel directly into the engine and knocked on the fuel tank from underneath the car, this seemed to let it start up. The RAC guy told us that this problem is associated with the fuel pump and will probably start to occur more often but I'm not sure if the crank position sensor problem is related to this [plus, fixing a fuel pump on an 18 year old car would probably not be worth the expense right?]

I would check the alternator. When the voltage gets low on cars with EFI and other electronic bits, really weird stuff starts happening, and stuff stops working as it should.

elwesso wrote:I would check the alternator. When the voltage gets low on cars with EFI and other electronic bits, really weird stuff starts happening, and stuff stops working as it should.

Are there any specific tests I could do to check if it's the alternator?

Easiest thing to do is check your battery voltage with a digital multi-meter. With the car just sitting, it should be a little over 12v, and running should be 13-ish volts with it increasing as RPM's increase.