CHEVY MALIBU INTERMITTENT NO CRANK NO START P0615 DIAGNOSIS & FIX

[Music] hey guys what's up it's eric with advanced level automotive welcome back to the channel welcome back to another video today i'm back here at one of the shops i do work for i got called out to take a look at this 2009 it's a chevrolet malibu it's got the four cylinder ecotech engine the customer complaint is that the vehicle will intermittently be a no crank no start so most of the time the car cranks up starts just fine but every now and then after driving the car for a while it will just be a no crank no start and what they're saying is that after they wait about 20 minutes or so let the car cool down it starts right back up so the shop is telling me that they did scan it for codes they didn't find any relevant codes at the time though this car just got dropped off again by the customer because i guess they kind of been going back and forth with it sometimes with these intermittent problems it's really difficult to diagnose them because you kind of have to catch it when it's happening and so what they're telling me is that uh the last week that they had the car they could never recreate the problem they could never duplicate it so they weren't able to pinpoint exactly what was going on and again like i said they didn't have any codes that related to the vehicle not starting and so they had the customer pick up the car the customer took the car and within a couple of days uh it started happening again and so they just brought it back so anyways we're here now let's check it out all right guys so first things first let's hop inside the vehicle and we're going to see if this thing cranks and starts up so we have the key right here i'm gonna go ahead and stick it into the ignition and uh i can get it in there there we go turn the key on uh first thing i like to do before i even try to crank it is look for a check engine light so you can see right now we do have a check engine light illuminated the other thing is that if you notice the security light i'm going to turn the key back off and turn it back on that security light right there you can see that it comes on for the bulb check but then it goes away so that means that we don't currently have any problems the check engine light does let us know that we do have communication with the engine computer so right now at the moment this car should start right up so let's go ahead and crank it as you guys can see the engine starts and runs just fine if you take a look at the instrument cluster here you can see that we don't have a check engine light present it did go away as soon as we started the engine up and again we don't have a security light on we do have this tire pressure monitor light but that has nothing to do with what we're dealing with right now we're mainly focused on why this car intermittently becomes a crank no start all right guys so the next thing i want to do is hook up my scan tool so right now we have the launch x431 pro 3s plus connected and so we're going to go ahead and go into the diagnostic menu and see if we have any trouble codes okay so i'm going to go ahead and run a full health report and what that's going to do is it's going to scan all of the modules on the vehicle so we're going to be looking at the bcm the ecm tcm all of it i want to see if there's any codes pertaining to uh anything that might have to do with it being a crank no start all right guys so our code scan is finished you can see starting up here at the top we have the ecm engine control module and we do have one code present actually a p0615 which is a starter relay control circuit that is interesting we do have a code stored but we don't have a check engine light illuminated uh so this is not a hard fault this is a code that has been saved in the memory and so that's something we're going to uh keep in the back of our mind because that definitely looks like a code that could be the reason why this thing is a crank no start intermittently and so scrolling down we do have a code in the radio for uh device power voltage below threshold so maybe the battery got low at some point in time and so that's why it set that code again we have some tire pressure monitor codes that we're not going to worry about and then you can see here in all of the rest of the modules we have the tcm no codes bcm no codes instrument panel no codes theft deterrent no codes so that's really important because if this problem had anything to do with the anti-theft system then most likely we're going to show some type of code in this module but you guys can see we don't have any codes in that module so right now i'm really more concentrated on the starter relay control circuit code and so let's go ahead and move under the hood and see if we can locate it let's pop the hood open this thing up this hood does not want to stay open by itself let me get something to hold it up with all right guys so moving under the hood you can see we use this little clamp to hold this uh strut open very useful tool to have if you guys don't have one i'll leave a link in the description where you can buy one but anyway we have the fuse box right here let me go ahead and pop the lid open the engine is running at the moment so let me pull this lid off and there we have our relay box and so let's go ahead and try to locate the starter relay we look here you can see our starter relay is going to be number 31 start this one right here so if we look at the fuse layout or the relay layout that's going to be this one over here now taking a look at this relay it actually looks like somebody uh might have replaced this relay already you can tell because these original relays have these numbers on here and uh these two don't so these do look like they have been replaced that makes me curious whether or not that code was set because somebody replaced that relay maybe they pulled the relay out with the ignition on and so that's why the code was set just something to keep in the back of my mind all right guys so believe it or not i'm actually reminded of a car that i worked on a while back that had the exact same symptoms as this car and it was actually the exact same car a 2009 chevrolet malibu though if i'm not mistaken i believe the last one i worked on it had a v6 not a four-cylinder engine but i don't think that makes a difference anyway i had this car that had the exact same symptoms and i actually made a video about it i might have posted it probably like three years ago if i'm not mistaken and so if you guys have not watched that video i'm going to post a link in the description for that video but essentially uh that car the lady the customer who owned it had the exact same problem uh what would happen is that the car would start it would crank and start just fine but after driving it for let's say half an hour or so when she would park the car let's say she stopped at the gas station turned the car off pumped gas got back into the car attempted to start it and it would not crank but after letting it sit for about 20 minutes or so the car would crank and start right up if you watched that video what i found was that the issue was actually inside of the fuse box it was actually a pretty cool video though it being an early video it wasn't really the greatest quality i didn't have a camera like i do now back then the iphone camera wasn't what it is now which is what i'm filming on but i was able to get the point across in that video uh in which i actually took the fuse box apart and i showed where there was a hairline fracture on one of the copper wiring that was embedded into the fuse box it's a really interesting design the way gm did this fuse box but essentially what was happening was this hairline fracture on the copper wiring would cause an issue with the starter relay in which when the engine bay would heat up the fuse box would heat up and so the metal would expand and it would create that gap where it wasn't making a connection and then once it cooled down that gap would close so i'm thinking that might actually be the problem that we're having with this car though really the only way to be a hundred percent certain is to uh try to heat up the fuse box so we could do that a couple different ways we could drive the car for an extended period of time and try to get the engine bay to warm up and see if we can get it to become a crank no start and then we can check the output of the starter relay to see if that's what's happening or we could take a heat gun and use that heat gun to heat up the fuse box and see if we can recreate the problem here in the shop so i think that's what i'm going to do next i'm going to go ahead and grab a heat gun take you guys under the hood and show you how i do this actually before we move under the hood let me show you guys that this car still cranks and starts just fine so i just took the key out of the ignition i'm gonna turn it back on you can see it starts cranks and starts right up and so right now we don't have a problem i'm gonna try it again stick the key back into the ignition and crank it back up again it starts right up so we don't have a problem right now let's try to heat up the fuse box and see if we can get it to become a no crank no start all right guys so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this heat gun right here and i'm going to turn it on and then we're basically going to heat up this fuse box now when you do this you do want to make sure that you keep the heat evenly uh moving across the fuse box you don't want to stay in one spot too long because you will melt something and so i'm basically just going to do this for a couple minutes and try to warm up this fuse box then we're going to see if this thing becomes no crank no start a few moments later all right so after a few minutes of doing this i'm gonna go ahead and see if we can start the vehicle up i'm gonna put my heat gun down now let's move inside and see if this thing cranks all right so i've got the key right here let's go ahead and put it into the ignition and see if it cranks check that out guys look at that i am trying to crank this and nothing is happening all right so now that we've duplicated the problem what i want to do next is i want to show you guys how we verify what circuit is giving us a problem so i'm going to go ahead and pull the starter relay out we're going to put an adapter in there and we're going to see what part of the starter relay is not working all right guys so i've got my uh relay tester kit up here i've already picked out the correct adapter it's going to be this four pin for the four pin starter relay i've already pulled the relay out of its hole right there so we're going to plug this in place of the starter relay so now that we have that in place before we stick this on there uh let me take you guys over to the wiring diagram and show you how this relay is set up all right guys so here we are taking a look at the wiring diagram for the starting system pretty simple setup and really what we're going to be focusing on is going to be the starter relay which is located right here you can see this dotted line this box that's going to be our fuse box under the hood and then this little rectangle box inside of that box is going to be our starter relay now this is just a basic 4-pin relay we have our control side and then we have our load side or what i like to call the switching side now on the control side we basically have an input on this pin 85 that comes from the engine computer so if we follow this wire out you can see that it comes from this dotted box right here that's labeled the engine control module and so the way this works is whenever you put the key into the crank position uh this engine control module is going to send out a power on this wire here and then that power is going to reach the control side of the relay it's going to go through the coil winding of the relay it's going to come out of the other side and you're going to see that this goes straight to a ground this g109 ground now if you look here this ground is a ground at all times so what that means is that as soon as this ecm sends out this power that immediately is going to energize the coil winding inside of this relay which is going to create a magnetic field and that's going to pull the switch closed so when this switch gets closed you're going to see that power is going to travel through this 30 amp fuse here and if you follow it up you can see that this fuse gets its power directly from the battery so that means here on pin 30 of our relay is always going to be hot it doesn't matter if the key is in the ignition or out of the ignition we're always going to have a power here at pin 30 waiting for something to happen like i said the ecm is going to send a power on this purple and white wire it's going to energize this coil winding inside the relay that's going to close the switch power is going to travel through this 30 amp fuse and it's going to make its way down to the starter motor solenoid once the power reaches the starter motor solenoid you're gonna see that there is an internal ground uh to the starter here and that's going to immediately activate the starter motor which gets its power uh from this big battery cable here and so on the starter motor we basically have two terminals our low current solenoid terminal and then we have our high current battery terminal and so in a nutshell that's basically how the starter system works it's very simple very straightforward now let me tell you guys where things can go wrong here now like i said i have run into this problem before and after posting a video about it i realize that it's a pretty common problem and so in my particular case what i found was that when the fuse box heated up after a while of driving uh we started to lose connection to the ground on this circuit here for the pin 86 and so the way i figured this out was again i drove the vehicle around until it got hot enough and then it became a no crank no start and i went to the starter relay here and i did my basic checks and what i found was that i didn't have continuity to ground at this pin 86 and then what i found was that after pulling the fuse box out and disconnecting this x2 connector finding this c10 pin i checked it from here and i did have continuity to ground and so that proved that i didn't have any issue at the actual g109 ground the problem was actually inside of the fuse box the other interesting thing that i'd like to note here about this g109 ground is that this is actually a shared ground and it shares it with several different components one of them being the wiper motor and so i didn't actually film this but i did check to make sure whether or not the wiper motor was working because if the wiper motor is working then you can pretty much assume that this ground is still good anyway like i said in this case the problem turned out to be inside of the fuse box i did post a video about it a few years ago let me see if i can pull it up alright guys so here we have the video like i said this is one of my earliest videos if you look down here at the date you can see that uh i posted this back in january of 2018 in fact i actually shot this video back in 2015 because i remember the house i was living in at the time and that was the year that my son was born and so i actually shot this video before i even had a youtube channel i shot it knowing that you know eventually i wanted to share it online to help other people and so it kind of sat in my hard drive until i eventually started the channel and it was one of the earliest videos that i posted again if you guys watch this video it is an early video i apologize ahead of time for the quality um you know at the time i didn't have the best camera and i was pretty nervous so you might hear me stutter a lot but like i said i definitely recommend you guys to go back and watch this because i do explain how i figured out where the problem was anyways if you guys look at the screen here you can see that this is what the fuse box looks like when you take it apart now taking apart the fuse box is not as easy as it seems on this vehicle there are these uh bolts that go through the center of the box and so i did have to uh drill out the little pieces that go in there and i had to punch out the sleeves and so you know if you guys are gonna do this just remember that it does take a little bit of elbow grease to get this thing apart but once you do take it apart this is what it looks like you can see that we have this kind of network of these copper wires that are embedded into the plastic and now what i did when i took this apart is i located where the starter relay lived and then because i knew i had a problem on the circuit for the ground i basically followed that leg of the copper wiring to the other end of the fuse box and so if you watch the video you can see where i locate it i'll show you right here so this is our pin right here then i show you guys how i follow it up and then i'll show you guys where it comes out at the other end where it's going to go out onto the wiring harness and so what i did because i knew i had a problem somewhere in this copper line here is i actually set up a sort of a little bit of a science experiment if you look here you can see where i clamped one of the terminals to my power supply on one end right here where the relay pin goes and then i connected the other end to the outlet over here the pin that goes out to the wiring harness which eventually leads to our g109 ground and so what i did using my power supply was i ran current through it but at the same time i actually wired in series this test light so if you look over to the right of the screen you'll see this test light is lit nice and brightly and so what i found was that when i ran current through this board here on that particular copper wire it was able to carry the current just fine and it lit the test light nice and brightly and so what i did was i took out a heat gun which i'm going to play the video now you can see me heating up the board with the heat gun and if you guys pay attention to the test light over to the right you're going to see that eventually it goes out like that you guys see that the test light went out and so at the moment you can see on the lab scope we went down to zero volts when earlier it had full 12 volt battery voltage from the power supply and so heating up this board is what caused it to lose connection and so what i started doing here was i took my a little probe from my volt meter and i essentially kind of went down the line following this copper wire here and i was looking for a point in which where i touch one side i have voltage and where i touch the other side i don't have voltage because that's where i'm going to find where our problem is and so i kind of went down the line and i was watching uh the multimeter here if you guys look at the graphing meter you can see i'm just kind of touching it along the copper wiring and i'm looking for a dead spot and so eventually i did find the dead spot and it was right here so if you guys take a look at where this little bend is you can see that there's a little hairline crack and so you're gonna see it a little bit better when i zoom in on it right there you see that fracture right here this is where our problem is and so what's happening is that as this fuse box is heating up the plastic i believe is what's expanding and so when the plastic housing expands it's actually pulling this copper tubing or this copper wiring apart and that's when it loses connection and so when you let it sit for about 20 minutes or so the plastic cools down it contracts and it allows this uh copper line here to reconnect this little hairline fracture is what was causing our no crank no start now the way i actually fixed this was just by putting a dab of solder on here and rejoining the connection and then i put it back together and honestly after i soldered this back together it lasted for as long as the lady had the car which was about five years before she eventually sold the car now since posting the video it's gathered about 66 000 views which isn't terrible but when you look down at the comments section and you read a few of these comments you realize that i've actually been able to help a lot of people that have had the same problem and so reading some of these comments just really really fills my heart because it really solidifies why i do this in trying to help people that's really what drives me to do what it is that i do on youtube and so just looking at some of these comments it really makes me feel blessed that i'm able to do this i mean check out this comment here this guy says hey man i just wanted to say thank you so much for the video this was our issue and after three months with the new fuse box not a single issue you don't understand how much you've helped my family seriously we don't have the money to buy a new car god bless you i mean there's tons of comments like this i mean check out this comment you know this person was saying that they had this problem for over two years now and they couldn't figure out what the issue was and so they you know went through my video and they did the exact same thing that i did and what's funny enough is that they're telling me that it was actually cracked in the exact same place on the exact same bend on their circuit board which they're not the only people to tell me that if you look through here you're going to find that there's several people that mention that when they open up this fuse box the crack is in the exact same spot for example here's another guy down here jesse cortez and you can see that he says did this exact same test except without a test light and he found the same spot it was split in the same spot as the spot in my video so again it really seems like this is some type of recurring problem that i think gm should be owning up to they should have probably done a recall or at least some type of technical service bulletin because when i looked into this recently there still hasn't been a technical service bulletin letting technicians know that hey this problem could be inside of the fuse box and so that's causing a lot of misdiagnosis i mean look at this guy right here this bill wilson guy saying a lot of mechanics misdiagnosed the fuse block as a faulty ecu i bought a cobalt from a guy who spent 1400 at the dealership who was unable to repair it replace the fuse box and it was good to go i mean think about that guys imagine you take your car to the dealership with this problem these guys work on chevy's for a living and if there's not a technical service bulletin telling them that this is a common problem they may or may not know about it they might end up replacing a lot of other parts not being able to fix the problem all because gm didn't even get around to making a technical service bulletin to help out the technicians now before we move on i do want to explain to you guys uh why sometimes we get that p0615 code for the starter relay circuit because in my case the first time i ran into this i didn't have any trouble codes now some of the people in the comments section mentioned that they had the code po615 and so i did eventually tag that code in the video that i posted uh that way people that had the code um could find the video and you know hopefully the video might be able to help them with their problem but i do want to explain to you guys why sometimes we get the po 615 which in this case the car that we're looking at at the shop does have the po 615 and so the way the computer detects the po 615 is using a bias voltage and so essentially uh even when the circuit is open and the key is not in the crank position the ecm is going to be sending out a bias voltage on this line here and so this bias voltage when it goes through the relay coil winding it's going to come out on the other end and it's going to go directly to a ground now because it's a bias voltage it's a very low current voltage and what that means is that as long as this relay is plugged in and as long as we have good continuity to ground that bias voltage is going to be pulled down to ground and so if we were to take a volt meter and check pin 85 here with the relay plugged in we should see zero volts now if we took the relay out of its socket and checked pin 85 we would see a bias voltage and if i'm not mistaken i think the bias voltage is 2.4 volts so that's how the engine computer detects whether or not there's a problem with the starter relay it basically is sending out that bias voltage and it's expecting the bias voltage to get brought down to ground now when we have the problem inside of the fuse box where the copper wiring internal to the fuse box has fractured it heats up it separates and we lose continuity to ground what happens is that we see that bias voltage on pin 85 because at this point it no longer has a path to ground and so that's why the computer sets the po 615 because all the sudden it sees 2.4 volts here when it's expecting to see zero hopefully that makes sense to you guys but essentially that's how the system works in a nutshell now let me take you back over to the vehicle and let's do our checks alright guys so now that we went over the wiring diagram hopefully you understand what it is i'm trying to check here so moving over to the starter relay you can see that i did attach the relay to our adapter here and so i do have the power probe connected to the battery terminals and so what i want to show you guys is that when i take the power probe and i touch the pin right here so this pin right here is going to be our battery power so it's got a battery power at all times i'm going to touch it you can see that we do have full battery voltage there now i'm going to touch the pin next to it this pin is the pin that goes down to the starter motor so when we touch this we should see continuity to ground so i'm going to touch it you guys can see the power probe lights up green and it does show that we do have continuity to ground and so if we move to the other side of the adapter let me turn my light on here all right so hopefully you guys can see that a little bit better we're looking at the two pins on this side of the relay adapter now the pin to the left closer to us is going to be our ground for the control side of the relay and the pin to the right is going to be the pin for the computer control and so again the way this works is that the computer is going to send a voltage out when you have the key in the cranking position and that voltage is going to get grounded on this pin over here and so what i remember from the last time i ran into this problem is that the problem was on the ground side so when i touch this pin right here let's see if we have a ground all right you guys can see that we do have a full good ground on this pin right here now at this point this circuit should be working we've given it enough time to cool down and so at this point we should be able to actually start up the vehicle let me move inside real quick and see if we can start this thing up all right so i've got the key right here and let's see if it starts up all right you guys hear that it cranks up and starts i'm going to shut it off we're going to move back under the hood now what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the heat gun and heat up the fuse box once again and see if we can lose connection on that ground all right guys so for a visual aid i went ahead and i took one of these uh terminals and attached it to our ground pin on that relay adapter and if you guys can see i have this uh blue wire connected to our power probe now i know that beeping sound might be a little bit annoying but we are going to use this as an audio and visual aid and so right now we are showing that we do have continuity to ground you can see that the green light lights up showing us that we do have continuity to ground now we're going to take our heat gun turn this thing on we're going to heat up the fuse box we're going to watch and listen for the power probe to see if we lose continuity to ground so i'm going to sit here and kind of heat this thing up we're just going to watch the power probe and see if we lose continuity to the ground you guys see that it's flickering watch it alright guys so i was hoping to show you on the camera but uh as you guys can see for a moment the ground did flicker but uh i've been heating this thing up for a little while now and it has not completely gone away though that doesn't mean that we couldn't still have um bad continuity to ground because the power probe um is actually very sensitive when it comes to finding a ground oh you guys see that you see how it's flickering so we may show a ground but maybe that ground just can't handle the current of the starter relay so let me go ahead and try to crank the engine over and see if this thing starts or not got the key right here let's see if it'll start up you guys can see we have a no crank i'm gonna try it again no crank i am turning the key see no crank let's move back under the hood all right guys so there you have it proof that our problem is inside of the fuse box we have an issue with continuity to ground on the starter relay circuit just like i saw in the last one again once the engine temperature gets hot enough and the engine bay gets hot enough the fuse box gets hot enough then we have a connection problem internal to the fuse box and again as you guys can see we're looking at our bias voltage here 2.4 volts where we should be seeing a ground again i am connected to the ground pin here and again you can see that we're showing our bias voltage which is coming from uh the uh ecm now if you take a look i'm gonna go ahead and pull the relay out pull the starter relay out and just watch the bias voltage disappear oop accidentally pull the whole thing out let me stick it back in okay again you can see our bias voltage we should not have a bias voltage here we should be seeing a ground so i'm going to go ahead and pull the relay out i might need two hands for this there's our relay as you guys can see our bias voltage is gone now just to prove what it is i'm saying here i'm gonna switch this terminal over to our computer control side and take a look there's our bias voltage again i'm going to switch it back to where our ground should be and you can see we have nothing so again proof that our problem is internal to the fuse box all right guys so in conclusion the car needs a new fuse box now the shop owner did call the dealership to try to order one unfortunately the part is on national backorder and they're saying that they're not even sure when they're going to have availability now this is something that i have heard from several people over the past few years this thing has been on back order for a long time so at this point i'm not even sure if it's possible to get a new fuse box the shop really wants to replace the fuse box they don't want to try to go in there and fix it for a couple of different reasons uh number one is that uh the p0615 and the no crank no start is not the only problem that this fuse box can have i've actually seen several instances where people have issues with the vehicle going into reduced engine power mode because uh there's a fracture in the copper wiring not in the same spot for the starter relay but actually for the electronic throttle body and so there's several different places inside of that fuse box that could be a potential failure spot and so for that reason uh they don't want to pay me to go in there to tear the box open to try to solder one little spot you know if there's a possibility that the fuse box is still going to have problems in the future and so really they're trying to get a new one and so that's where they're at right now i mean it may come down to us having to do a temporary repair you know just to buy us time until we can get a new fuse box and so they might end up asking me to do the repair on the fuse box though right now like i said they're really more interested in finding a new one and just replacing it and being done with it if they do decide to have me do the repair on the fuse box then i will definitely make a video about it and i will post it on this channel so do keep an eye out for that anyway at this point i'm gonna go ahead and end up the video like i always say thank you guys for watching i hope you found the video useful informational educational entertaining if you did make sure to give it a thumbs up if you haven't done so already make sure you subscribe to the channel hit that notification bell i'll see you guys in the next one thanks [Music] [Music]

Channel: ADVANCED LEVEL AUTO

Views: 209,417

Keywords: p0615 starter relay circuit, po615 code, car wont start when hot, engine doesnt turn over, engine doesnt start just clicks, chevrolet malibu recall, chevrolet impala, saturn aura, saturn, pontiac, motor wont stay running, electrical problems in cars, no crank, no crank no start, wont crank, car wont crank wont start, gm recall the switch from hell, gm recall 2021, mechanic cant fix, mechanic cant, mechanic cant fix stupid, gm lawsuit, ignition switch replacement, how to fix

Id: tNMRbT1nZOk

Length: 32min 20sec (1940 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 08 2022