paul.f

Hello,

I recently inherited my Grandma's 2010 Honda Civic DX-G 4 door. It only has 44 000 km on it and has been taken care of well. About 2 weeks ago, I accidentally left the overhead light on overnight, and had to jump the battery the next day. Since then, when I turn on the headlights, all the interior lights (spedomoter, radio, etc.) get slightly dimmer. This hasn't been an issue though.

Yesterday, I took the car to get winter tires installed. They were installed and I drove the car home no problem. 2 hours later, I was on the highway going 110km/h when all of a sudden the digitial spedometer display/gas display/engine heat display went black. The RPM dash stayed lit, the air stayed on, and the radio stayed on. I was going down a hill, but realized I had no power and the engine had shut off I guess. Luckily, there was an exit off the highway, so I took it. As I did, the power steering stopped and even the brake didn't really work. The radio worked and the emergency flashers and signal indicator continued to work. I got to the side of the road and used the e-brake to stop. I shut the car off and made a few phone calls. 5 minutes later, I started the car and everything worked perfectly. I finished my drive (about 30 minutes) on the highway and parked the car with no issues. It was like it never happened.

I don't know much about cars. Please help. What is going on? I feel like a cable/wire or something somewhere is loose.

Please advise. Thank you very much in advance for taking the time to read and respond.

Paul

ezone

You can adjust the dash light brightness using the + and - buttons on the left end of the dash.
You can probably adjust with the headlights ON to a certain brightness, and adjust again with the headlights OFF (most people set to max brightness for daytime use, and set a bit dimmer for headlights on/night use to reduce glare).
FYI you will always have use of the regular brakes with the pedal, you only lost the power assist when the engine shut off. You just have to push the brake pedal harder than usual.
Same when you lose power steering: it still steers but it just requires more muscle.


Right now I don't have an answer for ya.

You mentioned several items you saw that quit working, it that all you noticed or is there more?Was it a loss of power? Loss of ground? Loss of network communications between computers?
There are an awful lot of possibilities one could wildass guess at, but if one could learn what fault codes are stored in the various control units all around the car one could probably make a more educated assessment as to why half of the dash appeared dead when the engine shut down.
The cheap generic code readers at the parts store cannot get the codes I'm talking about, but seeing if anything was stored in the engine computer anyway would be a start.

Of course, it would be much easier to figure it out if the car was dead and would stay dead. Randomly intermittent electrical faults can cause a person to pull all their hair out.

paul.f

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I really appreciate it. That's all I noticed that quit working.

Jeez, I don't know what happened, but I wish I did. I don't have a lot of money to take it to a mechanic who will charge me god knows how much to get it checked out. I drove it again yesterday for about an hour with no issue. Good as new :/

ezone

I browsed through a few wiring diagrams of the systems mentioned, and I didn't notice any single common item that one could point at and proclaim "bad" with any certainty.

As far as the gauges go, it's really odd that the upper set would go black while the tach stayed lit up and working, they all appeared to share the same powers and ground circuits. ...... and that leaves several questions about communication faults between those units.

I personally haven't experienced a complaint such as you describe---yet---so I don't even have a 'best guess' here.






A dealer level scanner is the only one I'm aware of that can obtain fault codes and data from the gauges and other body related systems....
But sometimes all the codes in the world can't tell you what the problem is......

and if it isn't actually broken and dead when the car gets looked at, and stay dead long enough to figure out why........ there may be a lot of guesswork with no real way of knowing if anything fixed it or not until it acts up again.