This pickup has ~250K miles and lives in East Texas so, while not abused or used really hard it does have to deal with rough county roads and generally humid and hot weather. The other day, I went out to go to town and the instrument cluster was non-functional, totally dead, with an ABS warning light.
I took it to my local mechanic and on the way, the cluster came back to life. When I got there, we tried the OBD scan but, the port was dead which we chased down to a burned out fuse that powered the dome light that was out. The check engine light was pointing back at a low voltage cluster problem.
Discussing it with the mechanic, he said Dodge runs everything through the "ECU" in the dash to deal with odometer rollbacks and related 'security' issues. These apparently have a "lithium battery?" in them that loses its charge over time and becomes an issue with weak primary batteries or sitting a long time without running.
In 1999, I question whether Dodge was using Lithium batteries to backup their 'security' settings, expecting a capacitor or similar technology. This brings up the question of what I can do to prevent this problem from taking the pickup out of service at some inconvenient time.
Will an AFTERMARKET TUNER delete this problem from the pickup? I am have zero concern about an odometer rollback or any similar 'security or theft' issues with a worn out well used pickup like this. Emissions and other issues on something this old shouldn't be an issue either so, I'm hoping an aftermarket tuner or something similar is a viable FIX.
TIA,
Sid
I took it to my local mechanic and on the way, the cluster came back to life. When I got there, we tried the OBD scan but, the port was dead which we chased down to a burned out fuse that powered the dome light that was out. The check engine light was pointing back at a low voltage cluster problem.
Discussing it with the mechanic, he said Dodge runs everything through the "ECU" in the dash to deal with odometer rollbacks and related 'security' issues. These apparently have a "lithium battery?" in them that loses its charge over time and becomes an issue with weak primary batteries or sitting a long time without running.
In 1999, I question whether Dodge was using Lithium batteries to backup their 'security' settings, expecting a capacitor or similar technology. This brings up the question of what I can do to prevent this problem from taking the pickup out of service at some inconvenient time.
Will an AFTERMARKET TUNER delete this problem from the pickup? I am have zero concern about an odometer rollback or any similar 'security or theft' issues with a worn out well used pickup like this. Emissions and other issues on something this old shouldn't be an issue either so, I'm hoping an aftermarket tuner or something similar is a viable FIX.
TIA,
Sid
