Thoroughly confused

[Slickwilly]

Power steering itself is controlled by an ECU, but it's fused through the high current fuse array.
Have you looked at the charts of all of the grounds on these trucks? Hootbro has posted ground location drawings and no kidding, there's grounds all over the place. For the rear, there's multiple ground points on the frame. Likely similar for the front - not just body grounds.
But do check the fuses in the PDC. Easy to do - pull the cover off and make sure all fuses are inserted fully.
Of they Jeeps we've owned I've never seen or had a fuse issue - they were always fully inserted and making great contact. Never had one that I could push in any farther, but others have had such problems.

Update: Problem solved. Was the CAN-C-BUS

2020 Gladiator overland. Auto start stop has never worked. Recently all warning lights started flashing and wouldn't go in gear. Main battery tested bad so I replaced it and solved the issues. After research I decided to eliminate the ess battery in case it was draining the main battery. Removed the negative ess cable and pulled fuse 42 per instructions. Now auto stop start functions perfectly??

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[Slickwilly]

As long as you always turn off ESS using the button on the dash, the single battery will not be an issue, until it needs replaced again.

The primary purpose of the ESS battery is to keep the computers and electronics stable. The two batteries are paralleled together all the time, except during the startup test and during ESS events. The intent of the ESS battery is to keep the computers from rebooting due to low voltage, which can happen when the main battery ages when using ESS with just the primary battery connected.

It ended up being the star connector for the can bus behind the glove compartment.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

It ended up being the star connector for the can bus behind the glove compartment.

No surprise. I've had two weird things happen due to connection issues there. The first was the darned thing dropped into park and went crazy when it lost communication with the shift lever system. 2 seconds later it was fine. I used AlfaOBD and found weird bus communications issues (but no MIL was set, no light came on)
That was the 2020 JT
Another time it freaked thinking it wasn't in gear when it was - and that was on the 2022. Never happened again but I did find weird CANbus errors with jscan later.
Jeep has some issues with that area - need to rethink their connectors or something. Apparently it's really sensitive to tiny amounts of voltage drop across the connections.

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