2011 2500 diesel stalling

farmer4701

My 2011 stalled once the first month I got it and has continued to do it. no error codes shown per dodge. yesterday it did a constant stall for 5 miles. this was in stop and go traffic and did it each time the engine got near 2000 rpm and then it ran okay all the way home a 40 mile trip. this problem is not a constant and did not do it for the past 6 months. i have replaced the cam and crank position sensor with no help of the stalling problem. any suggestions of what i can do outside of getting another truck.

Mr_Shiftright

What's the state of maintenance on your fuel filtration?

farmer4701

As i said, the 2500 did this stall the very first month I had it. All maintain is up to date and done by the dealer ship where i bought it. I have had the 2500 in to them for this problem multiple times and from my calculations they put around 500 miles on it and could not get it to do the stall. my drive is all country and baltimore beltway. but this can happen anywhere at any time and gives no error codes. the dealership said that if they don't get error codes, they cannot fix it. now this time it stalling was in stop and go traffic and seemed to do it each time the tac got to around 2000 rpm's and then I would shift to the next gear. when this happens i do anything to try to get out of the stall. down shift, up shift, hard clutch, soft clutch and this time it just came out of the stall its self and then ran okay for 40 miles. I guess the only thing I can do is get rid of it this week and never buy a cumming diesel again. they are not fixable.

thecardoc3

Problems like this are fixable, but it takes a different kind of technician and a very disciplined approach. The fact that it doesn't set codes doesn't make it impossible to solve, in fact it strongly suggests that there may be a momentary loss of system power making it look to the computer like the engine is being turned off. That is something that at this point isn't a diagnosis, it's a point that must be proven/disproven, the problem with that however is the randomness of the failure. To approach a failure like this I would put several tools to use to allow me to measure multiple signals simultaneously, then its just a matter of driving it long enough to get the reported symptom to occur. This is the point that can be very frustrating, or can be rewarded by some dumb luck depending on just how long it takes for the engine to stall and produce data about the event. Once the symptom occurs, then the next step greatly depends on just what was observed both by testing results as well as what I felt the vehicle actually do. One failure might be enough to present a solution and then again it may require several events to pinpoint the cause.

It's important to mention that techs that have learned how to test like this did so without being paid for their time on the job chasing these kinds of problems. Nobody ever wanted to pay and quite often once the solution was in hand we quite often were told things like "If you were really as good as you think you are you would have known that what was wrong." They would also say things like "We can't pay you to learn how to work on someone's car". Anyway you look at it, instead of being rewarded for the effort that work like this demands we were punished for having tried, and that's why it's hard to find techs that can and will attack a problem like this. The common perception is to wait until it breaks completely and then it would be much easier to solve.

farmer4701

As I have said before, this stall can happen anywhere and at any time. On our beltway and in 70 mph traffic, luckily i was in the fast lane and emergency strip, it went from 70 to 15 in a matter of seconds and I was able to get it off the road before it got me killed . The problem that it is a well known problem across several production years and neither Dodge nor Cummins have any idea of what the problem is, and obviously they don't want to know, I guess I have to pass the trash on as a trade in and get a truck, not a dodge, that I am safe on the road with. I wish I could afford to have to truck trashed and crushed instead of passing it, but I am not that rich and I don't have the luxury of trying ever repair shop in town to see if someone can fix it. And as I have said, the local dodge dealer's repair shop has become a plug and play and not any diagnostic capabilities.

thecardoc3

On average, how often does it happen in any given week?
What is the minimum time that transpired between events, and what has been the maximum?

As far as the dealer not employing techs that can and will troubleshoot a random failure like this, its more a matter of there is little to no incentive for a tech to work hard enough to learn how. When you take all of the insults and damning stories through the years and try to see what they really accomplished they discouraged a lot of the people who could have been great techs capable of solving problems like your truck has efficiently from even entering the trade. Meanwhile the people who did become techs and eventually took on these kinds of tasks found themselves usually unpaid for the time that had to be invested and insulted and demeaned for having tried.

Do you remember all of the parts stores using code pullers and claiming that was diagnostics?
Do you remember things like CarMD where they called shops rip-offs for charging for diagnostics while they sold a cheap code puller and claimed to be able to allow you the consumer to do everything that someone like myself was really going to do ?
Do you ever remember anyone stepping up and pointing out what their noise was doing to the people that you need right now to be there for you?

Beyond the time that would have to be invested to get a failure event (or several of them) to occur, in order to allow it to be analyzed and the fault proven, your truck's stalling problem would be easy for me to figure out. The question always comes back to just how much time would need to be invested and who is going to pay for it. Every time we as employee's and even then for some of us eventually as a business owner invested that time free to a customer, we in fact were the one's paying and we really couldn't afford to do that. Not getting paid for the most difficult work drove most if us out of the bays and convinced just about everyone else to not bother trying to learn. People often say you get what you pay for, and in fact many of the people that techs like myself helped out over the years got way more than they paid for which explains why your statement below is as much dealer managements fault as it is the consumers, and self appointed consumer experts.

farmer4701 said:

I wish I could afford to have to truck trashed and crushed instead of passing it, but I am not that rich and I don't have the luxury of trying ever repair shop in town to see if someone can fix it. And as I have said, the local dodge dealer's repair shop has become a plug and play and not any diagnostic capabilities.

You don't have to try every shop in town, you need an electronics/diagnostics specialist and the good news is that there are still some around in spite of what they went through to be tooled, trained and capable of handling random problems like this one. You can use the member directory in the iATN to search out one near you at. www.iATN.net