Hopefully some of the experienced people here can help me with a problem I am having with my 2006 Automatic TSX (I am the 2nd owner). No mods, completely stock, and only has 56k miles.


THE PROBLEM:

2 days ago, I was driving and noticed that the NAV restarted on its own. It kept on doing this several times, so I did a search and thought that I had a bad NAV unit that needed to be refurbished.

I tried unplugging the NAV unit completely because the restarts were annoying, but after unplugging, noticed that now there would be moments where the entire car would feel like it lost total power, the radio/CD player would pause for half a second, the clock area and temp gauge would go blank, and then a warning chime would sound and it would flash something (after carefully watching about 10x, it was an error that said "Check Airbag").

All of the above happens in less than 1-2 seconds, and everything will resume again and it seems completely fine (for another 5-10 minutes). This happens over and over again, and its driving me INSANE.

I havent had a chance to take it into the dealer or mechanic yet, but I just wanted to do some homework on the problem first.

Here is what Ive done to try to solve the problem:

1) Unplugged the NAV thinking it was the NAV
2) Unhooked the battery to see if I could reset everything ( this solved the problem for about 15 minutes and then it came back again)
3) Cleared the SRAM of the NAV unit just to see if that would help
4) Tightened up and cleaned my battery connections.

I know that I have a good battery as mine died recently and I had it replaced less than 2 months ago when it died.

Ive read on a similar post that the TSX might have a bad negative battery cable? but wasnt entirely sure if I had the same problem or not.

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction or help me understand what the problem might be. Thank you for any responses. Its greatly appreciated

 

Its likely something within the alternator/battery/voltage regulator system. My bets are with the voltage regulator or alternator (which I believe are a single combined unit).

Can you put a multimeter (voltmeter) on the battery POS and a ground spot, with the engine off and on? With it off, it should be about 12.6V. With the engine on, it should be about 14.4V and not fluctuating much or at all. If its fluctuating wildly, the voltage regulator could be toast. If its not even above 14.4V and more in the 13V range, then I'd suspect an alternator problem.

You get all kinds of warning lights and strange crap happening when a part of the electrical system is malfunctioning. It usually happens when the components are not getting enough voltage from the alternator.