car dies randomly, sometimes restarting

[frizbal]

I have a 99 3.8L camaro. Drive great, no problems preformance wise except it dies at random times. Some times when driving it will die for less than a second and start up again by itself. The main problem is it will die and the gauges will go out for about 5 seconds then the gauges go crazy and flicker then I can start the car again but not after that. It's almost as if the computer is restarting itself. Once it died when I hit a bump, once it died when i turned the radio back on. Oh ya, and when it dies it resets the tripometer and my radio settings. Any ideas? It has no other problems and only started this the other day.

[ikeyballz]

im almost ceratin its battery related.

check the connections to the battery, follow it down to the ground/power.make sure they're all tight. if they're loose, they will do the same thing..
if those things are all good, it may be a busted ECU...or a short somewhere thats drawing LOTS of power, enough to pop a few circuit breakers and kill the comp to prevent it from frying..?

[blindeyed]

Originally Posted by ikeyballz

im almost ceratin its battery related.

check the connections to the battery, follow it down to the ground/power.make sure they're all tight. if they're loose, they will do the same thing..

I have to HIGHLY agree. Sounds exactly like what happened to me a while back when I had some bad terminals on my battery. The screws that screw in the side posts were stripped and weren't making a good connection, so when I would be driving all of a sudden out of nowhere everything would just die, so I would have to wiggle the battery cable to get the connection going again. Definitely check that out.

[frizbal]

Ya, I found out it was the battery. I knew things would go funny with the battery being bad but I didn't think it would jump so crazily. I replaced the battery and problem solved. Thanks guys!

[frizbal]

Well i found out it wasnt the battery, but it was the battery cable that went to the fuse box under the hood. the bolt thats holds down the wire had come loose from my dirt roads i live on. Tightened it up and its good to go. So now.... 80$ battery= receipt/refund!!