I noticed that my radio rebooted a couple times when I was heading to work the other day. I didn't think much of it cuz it didn't happen later that day or days to come. When I was parking my car tonight I noticed that my lights started to dim while turning my steering wheel to pull into a spot. Once I was parked I rotated the wheel all the way to the right and to the left. I noticed that in several spots that the lights would dim or go completely out. The worst was when all the way to the left. Every time I would bump the far left spot the radio would reboot and lights would dim.

I wondered if it was just a fluke thing so I turned the car off and tried to turn it back on but nothing. No click or anything but all other electronics worked. I tried moving the wheel into different positions to see if it had any effect on the car starting. I didn't matter. At this time I was thinking maybe the steering column was bumping into the ground wire for the starter and figured I would have to try and look at it in the morning as it was dark out.

Before I went in for the night I decided to take a look at the battery connection just for the heck of it. The connections seemed fine but my capacitor for my sound system was flashing 0 volts which I found strange. I disconnected the battery and reconnected it but the cap still read 0 volts. I checked the ground on the cap and noticed it was a little loose. I tightened this up and the cap started to show the correct voltage of the battery.

Thinking all of this was very strange I decided to try to start the car again. To my surprise the car stared right up without a problem. I went back to moving the steering wheel around to see if there was still a problem with the lights dimming and radio rebooting. Nothing had changed. Still acts like there is a bad ground or the electronic steering is putting to much strain on the battery. Before I start troubleshooting further in the morning I figured I would check and see if anyone had any thoughts on what may be going on.

 

Sounds like you've got it pretty well figured as being the power steering causing an issue. Did you ever have the recall work done to the power steering motor?

 

Yeah. All of the recall work has been done. I also have had the column replaced before under warranty as it was loose and possible cracked and was rattling like crazy. I have not had any problem with it and it has been 2 yrs or more since. Even if it is the motor going bad again it doesn't answer why the car wouldn't restart. Disconnecting the battery may have reset the ECU which may have corrected the problem but doesn't determine what was causing it to not start. That is unless the bad ground from the cap was causing a short which tripped something in the ECU