I hope the title got your attention . Um, I'm not sure what's going on. The starter clicks rapidly, my dash and Navi goes in and out rapidly, and the car won't start. I check the battery, it's good, the terminals are good, and I check the fuses under the hood. I haven't check the fuses under the dash yet. It's been a long day and this really wasn't something I needed today. The wife was driving the TL all day and no problems. She came home to pick me up (got off work) and when we got in the TL, this happened


I disconnected the battery and hope the ecu would reset. I was thinking something may have trigger something in the ecu and restarting it could've been an option. Nope, that didn't work either. I'm pretty burn out today and my brain isn't working. You guys have any ideas?

I had a friend recommend that I check the grounds. Not sure where to start. I'm gonna get off work early tomorrow and try to find the problem. I'm thinking a bad ground also

 

You have all the symptoms of a bad battery. That's exactly what happens to the TL when you try to start it on low battery. What makes you say your battery is good?

 

Wow, that's pretty messed up. I have seen cars do some weird things when batteries go bad, but that's extreme lol. I hope it's infact as simple as replacing the battery. I have seen batteries just die without any warning signs before. Be irks great earlier in the day, then that same days it's fried. Keep us posted.

 

I've seen a quite a few TL's exhibit the exact same symptoms when trying to start with a low battery. It'll power the nav on just fine(like in OP's video), but when you try to crank it, the cluster will flutter a lot and nav will shut off during cranking(nav shutoff is normal). Even when my car had a low battery it showed the exact same symptoms.

this is no devil, this is exactly how the TL behaves.

 

Well guys, I woke up this morning and read everyone's post. I tested the battery yesterday and I was getting 12 Volts out of it and I thought it was good. I said "what the heck" and swap batteries this morning. Sure and behold, it was the battery. Thanks for the help fellas

 

Measuring standing voltage on the battery is about the worst indicator of health you can get. You really want to know internal resistance, but thats a bit harder to measure. That typically shoots up as the battery ages and sulfates. This means more voltage drop, less available current, less available starting power. It takes about 100x the current to crank a cold engine as it does to run the radio.

One more thing, below about 12.2V is a dead battery. A charged battery should read ~12.6V after sitting unloaded a day.