Sudden catastrophic power failure at 13 months 20,000 miles.

[Lost1wing]

Loose connections, fires never happen. It's just a report. Data is collected.

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[ShadowsPapa]

Confirmation bias at its finest. Because I can find similar threads on my issue when I do a search specifically for it, that means it's widespread!

Similar being the key words. It's like certain other things discussed heavily in the Jeep world - symptoms the same, causes can be very different.
Main battery, aux battery, blown fuse, charging system faults, loose connections and even Jeep has come out saying "check these grounds" and "check these connectors".
Electrical issues............. can drive you nuts unless you are systematic, logical, and use real troubleshooting methods.

I point back again to Tysongladiator's fun but informative, or is it informative but fun? Youtube video he posted in a thread he started some weeks ago.
The guy brings it all down to the common owner.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Loose connections, fires never happen. It's just a report. Data is collected.

Loose connections caused by owners, techs, battery swappers at a parts store - you name it. Loose connections happen on all vehicles (well, maybe not Lexus) So that means every single owner of any vehicle (except Lexus) should be reporting any of their loose connections that caused their vehicle to stop, or not to start, or to behave erratically?

Why bring fires into this?
If there's a fire, report it - but you may as well admit you did the wiring yourself, you didn't use a winch disconnect switch of some sort and do all of the work yourself...............
Report fires, but I'd be careful about trying to place blame unless you've not worked on it yourself, or if you have that you are a professional and can point to a cause not connected to any accessory.
But again, why bring fires into it? This is about a specific type of failure/symptom with multiple possible causes like someone with a runny nose could have covid, the flu, or simple allergies.
Anyone seeing these things pop up in a Jeep need to do some deeper diving, or the tech should, and find the cause of the blow fuse, or try to find how a loose connection happened.
Since these are not FACTORY issues...... not sure where anyone else would go with it.
The NHTSA if they gave a rat's......... would likely report "keep owners paws out of the electrical system" or "technicians need to be more careful" (and that could be said about almost any make/model)
A few will point to a battery failure, maybe a charging system issue - so what? That stuff happens in all of them. My son had similar on his Ford Fusion! BATTERY issue.

 

[Hootbro]

NHTSA does not discourage reporting even if it seems trivial now. They still take the data point and see if it trends over time.

Back in 2015, I reported to NHTSA my then 2015 RAM 2500 of my knee hitting the key and causing it to turn off. In 2019, the contacted me for more data on it.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

NHTSA does not discourage reporting even if it seems trivial now. They still take the data point and see if it trends over time.

Back in 2015, I reported to NHTSA my then 2015 RAM 2500 of my knee hitting the key and causing it to turn off. In 2019, the contacted me for more data on it.

2015 to 2019 - 4 years? Must have taken a while to get other reports.

NHTSA won't discourage reporting - if they did, then people would try to judge for themselves if it was something to write to them about. Most people won't know one connection type from another. All most know is the frustration of an issue they may not know the cause of. In your case - pretty simple, a lot of people would hit the ignition switch causing shutdown. Cut and dried - design issue. What would FCA do about that? That would be an interesting discussion half a decade later.

I suppose in the case of the "pull over, we're shutting down" message, if enough reported it, maybe it would force a totally different style of battery clamp. and yet - this type of battery cable termination has been used on how many hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
If NHTSA asks for more information 1, 3 or 4 years down the road - will many Jeep owners actually understand or know the cause of the issue? Or will it be "it was a connection fixed at the dealership" type of thing.
My vehicle shut down.
Can you tell me more?
Dealer said it was a blown fuse.
And from there - was it due to someone not knowing what they were doing
or in the case of a loose connection, best they could do is try to see if they left the factory that way.
We can be pretty sure they didn't.

Report it - but I'd be pretty surprised if many others did, or it was looked at because it's more of a servicing issue than a factory/design issue.
A loose connection on my 82 can cause a blown fuse and cause low voltage and cause a shutdown of the engine. I wonder how many reported that.

 

[sharpsicle]

I'm still confused. What is going to be reported here? That a battery was flat? Or that a non-existent aux sensor went bad?

I'm all for reporting, but I don't get what you would even report here.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

I'm still confused. What is going to be reported here? That a battery was flat? Or that a non-existent aux sensor went bad?

I'm all for reporting, but I don't get what you would even report here.

That's pretty much my point. What is to be reported?
If someone who wants to see it reported would give an example of what they are reporting and how they'd report it, that might help
What happened, when it happened, if possible how it happened. One thing that maybe can't be made clear is what started the events leading to the shutdown warning.
So, an example of what would be reported, please.

 

[Badunit]

I know it is not a failure to be laughed at but I can't help laughing over it giving a "Help me to a chair, I think I'm about to pass out" message before it passes out.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

I know it is not a failure to be laughed at but I can't help laughing over it giving a "Help me to a chair, I think I'm about to pass out" message before it passes out.

Hey, at least it warns you! Vehicles of the past often shut down if the voltage was too low for ignition or injection.

And then there's the serious side as I can personally relate with Meniere's and vestibular migraine issues in recent months - get me to a chair or the floor fast, I'm going DOWN!

I think Jeep should take your message and run with it - be a bit more relatable........ warp core going offline in 10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6............ maybe some warning about a core containment breach.

 

[Lost1wing]

If this becomes a bigger issue as the get older, having data early on could prove helpful. This time, no one stalled out on a two lane highway and froze to death being stranded. It may or maynot be a reliability issue. If it is not reported, it never happened. As to what the fix was, who knows. Incompetent techs not diagnosing the problem correctly and covering up their incompetents with a faulty sensor and a bad battery, well yes, that is not a reason to file a complaint.

I tossed the fire term out there for urgency. The OP knows only what the dealer has told him. It's not normal for a low mileage vehicle to just die like that. It wasn't the first one either. It may never be a trend, but it certainly won't If not reported.

Let's say the dealer did their troubleshooting correctly and a bad sensor was the cause. Are their a batch of bad sensors? Are the batteries causing the issue? I don't think it is a bad thing to file a report. Nothing may come of it, but who knows.

 

[Puch]

?

 

[ShadowsPapa]

It even sits for a week or two without a battery tender and still starts every time. Imagine that!

Starting was never the issue.
if it didn't start after sitting- it's most likely the crap batteries these come with.
With a good battery, of course it will start. F42 and the ESS had nothing to do with that.
You fixed it with a good quality battery.
Dealerships are pretty bad sources of information, sorry to say.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Good for you! If you think it’s worth submiting a complaint, do it. Don’t let anyone talk you out of it. The ESS system is a POS. As soon as I had indications that the ESS system was having issues and the worthless dealership told me I wasn’t driving it long enough, I removed F42 and the small batt as fast as I could. Installed the biggest battery that would fit under the hood and haven’t regretted it once. I think it’s been almost two years now?? No change in driving habits and all is well. It even sits for a week or two without a battery tender and still starts every time. Imagine that!

Thinking further - since there are so many issues with the batteries in these, meaning they are crap batteries, and the issues with parasitic draw, sitting for a few days can be an issue and so on, maybe some generic "vehicle shut down, battery issues" is a good thing to report.

He can't use the bovine excrement info the dealership gave - it's bunk as there is no aux battery sensor, there is no sensor that is responsible for charging the aux battery - it gets power for charging directly from the alternator through a high current fuse - NO sensor.
In that sense it's just like a 1995 system. That means it's getting whatever voltage the system says on the volt meter while the truck is running.
In the case of the OP, it's likely the dealership simply swapped parts until it was working (sadly, that's too often true with electrical issues)They were clueless.
Since there's such an issue with either main battery going south, aux battery going south, either or both causing shutdowns, approach it that way?

There's otherwise no pattern, no one thing causing this sort of a shutdown. It's always electrical, but it might be a way to get the batteries looked into.
The list of causes is otherwise long and varied - and can even be "non-trained/non-professional" working on Jeep" (mostly meaning dealerships).
NHTSA would otherwise be looking at people, not things.
There's one thing that's common to a large number of jeep electrical issues - batteries.
Even 4xe people complain about DEAD 12 volt batteries. It's a huge topic with them.
Seriously? they don't even have an alternator, they don't even have ess, and they don't have an aux battery.
Jeep has battery issues.

 

[jebiruph]

@JeepCares Leading up to this there hasn’t been a warning light, off sound or any indication whatsoever of mechanical issues.

Here' my hypothesis on what happened.
Since there were no warning lights leading up to the initial failure, the CEL for the charging system must have been caused by the failure. The negative battery cables may have been bumped and come loose from the IBS during the dealer maintenance, preventing the main battery from charging and leading to the failure of the aux battery over the next few days.

I wouldn't be surprised if the dealer techs accidentally shorted the positive battery cable while working on the batteries and blew the N3 fuse, further complicating their troubleshooting. Blaming the IBS could be their way of recovering some cost and obfuscating their incompetence.

As others have stated, the IBS has nothing to do with the aux battery. Here's my diagram that shows how the aux battery current does not interact with the IBS.

 

[Lost1wing]

I thought dealer tech incompetence right away. Followed by a cover up story.

For the initial problem to occur, who knows. If we could only have been there. Maybe there were other signs of an eminent failure that the OP did not catch.

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