Joe70

Hello all! This is my first post on this site so my lurking days are officially over. We purchased this truck about 4 months ago and it's been perfect until this week. A couple days ago my wife commented to me that the GX "had some trouble starting". I tried to get some more detailed info from her, IE. is it intermittently not turning over, turning over very slowly, not turning over at all, etc. That info was not very reliable due to her limited knowledge of basic auto mechanics so I'm starting from scratch. Yesterday she called me from work and said that her GX almost didn't start again on her way to work. I got off early and went to check it out and see what I could find. Upon arrival, and without starting the truck I popped the hood and checked the battery voltage. 10.1V on my meter is the reading that I got directly from the posts. Ok so I must be on to something here.... Assuming that it wouldn't even turn over, I turned the key just to confirm and much to my surprised it started right up. Huh? While running the voltage at the battery almost immediately went up to 13.6V. At this point I decided I better check the battery before I do anything else. Pulled the battery out and took it over to a parts store to test the battery. Voltage was low at 12.29V but the battery tested out good, with the side note to completely charge the battery. Put the battery back into the truck and started it up only to have it immediately stall out. Start again, idle was quite low (400ish), after putting in gear it stalled again. It did this a couple more times until finally I was able to get the truck home without any more stalls. After getting the truck home I decided to check for a parasitic draw to see if anything weird was happening with the electrical system. immediately after connecting with my meter the draw was about 0.9 amps. Ok, so now I start pulling fuses and the first fuse I pulled the draw dropped off to less than 0.1 amps. That fuse was the stereo fuse. I decided to check again to confirm my findings so I put the fuse back in and started checking some other fuses. While I was doing this the draw dropped off, on it's own, to less than 0.1 amps in between my pulling other fuses. So the conclusion that I've drawn from this testing is that immediately after connecting my meter the stereo draws about 0.9 amps but after a minute or so it drops to under 0.1. I'm guessing that this is probably normal? After I was done looking for a draw I hooked up the battery to a charger and let it charge for a few hours. After battery charged I reconnected the terminal and let it sit until this morning. Again I checked the voltage before starting this morning and I it was 12.64V. Started it up and then it stalled right away. Second attempt did the same thing. Third try and it was good and idling around 800 rpm. After that the wife jumped in and drove it to work with no issues. we'll see what happens when she gets off to today but I suspect more of the same. I'm thinking that I may have a couple different issues going on here, related or unrelated I'm not sure. If anyone has any suggestions on what to do next it would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for all of the info i've put out there for my initial post but I just wanted to make sure I included every detail no matter how minor. Thanks for reading.

spacekase

Check to see if your throttle body is all gummed up. Had the same issue years ago on my Tundra and like you I was tunnel visioned into the electrical system..battery, alt...

470SNC

My battery recently went bad so I replaced it with a new battery. I noticed immediately the GX would stall upon starting. I believe the GXs need to reset and relearn once the battery is reset. It stalled, started again, and drove around the block aggressively for the ECU to reset and relearn. It was fine after that. It's sorta odd that this happens but after that initial hiccup it was fine.

GXinSD518

The start and stall issue usually happens whenever the battery is disconnected. Like 470SNC said, the ECU resets to a baseline idle throttle position whenever it loses power. If the throttle body is dirty, the baseline idle position isn't wide enough to compensate for buildup on the throttle body and the engine stalls. Just drive around a bit, the ECU will relearn the idle position. Also, if your battery is going bad, the ECU may be losing power overnight and resetting the idle throttle position.

For reference, my GX stalls out on the first start almost every time I disconnect the battery. I should probably take it as a sign to clean out my throttle body...

Joe70

Thank you for the responses guys, I really appreciate it. To update.... The truck has been running great for the last couple of days with not stalls or hard starts. I would imagine that there is still an underlying issue with the electrical system somewhere that caused the original problem but so far so good. When I have some spare time next week I will clean up the throttle body. Hopefully that is all it was. I will update here if this problem comes back.

Thanks again