EliteCM.net

Yesterday my car suddenly died on me i was waiting outside a store for my gf to come back and i noticed my fuel gauge suddenly just dropped to empty. Weird I thought so I turned the car off tried to turn it back on and it was dead. Got it towed to my friends shop we put the battery on a charger (the battery is brand new btw) and put a new alternator on and it still wouldn't charge the battery light on the dash still came on. We checked the wires to and from the battery they all checked out fine. All the fuses were good. So we thought maybe its a defective alternator. Put another new alternator on today and the same thing. The battery still isn't being charged. At this point I'm lost as to what the problem could be. The alternator we took off was the original one, and we were sure that was the problem. Is there something I'm missing? Should I try a new battery? The one in the car is only a month old.

test the voltage at the battery with the car running, it should be around 14volt

If test the voltage at the battery while the car is running like Pascal suggested. It's strange that something like that would happen if there is no damage to the wire harness from the alternator to the battery.

It could be a battery but do the voltage test first. Some times batteries short internally by the plates in the touching or arcing. If you getting voltage from that alternator at the battery than its the battery not accepting the charge

I'm dropping it off at another shop tonight. The guy specializes with automotive electronics. I'm going to get him to check the battery before he gets too deep into it. I'll let you guys know what it was.

Turns out the wire going up to the fuse panel had a hidden break in it, so the alternator was only working some of the time. This also caused a fuse to pop, and the connections were all pretty dirty. After we fixed all that, she is good to go again. Thanks everyone.

Good thing it is fixed. One thing I wonder, why did you bother asking for help if you didn't even plan to try to repair it yourself. I mean any good mechanics will have found out easily and none of them want to know your supposition of what a guy from a forum told you. Not trying to be rude or judge you, just seems like a lot of people do this and always makes me wonder why they do.

At the time of posting I was attempting to fix it myself. However when I could not find the problem right away I had no other choice then to bring it to a shop, being it was the only car I have on the road currently.

yeah okay I get it.