Electronics Not Working in Your Car or Truck How to Fix Electrical Glitches

I cannot get any of these electronics to work right. This thing's driving me nuts.

Do you have a vehicle that has a lot of electronics and once in a while you have a glitch, and you just don't know what's going on, something's not working right? Well, in this video, we're gonna show you how to fix it, show you what to look for. In your vehicle, you have so many electronics, so many computers working together to try to make things work. Even if you don't have high-end electronics, there's still computers trying to work together. With all those electronics talking to each other and all the inputs, once in a while, you're gonna have a glitch.

Some of the symptoms that you could find is touchscreens not working properly, audio not working, you may not have sound out of the speakers, you may have a touchscreen that is completely blank. And it could affect other things as well. Now, even if you have an older vehicle, computers control a lot of different things such as climate control, or even the windows, the window switches, a lot of times there's computers in there. So if they're overloaded with different inputs, or something's not lining up right, you could get a glitch. With all these electrical nightmares that can drive you nuts trying to figure them out, just like your phone or your laptop, if you had glitches or some problems with them, what do you do? You reset it.

Now before we do anything, it's always a great idea if you have a scan tool that can read more than just engine codes, to scan the vehicle, see what's going on. See if you have any weird codes, record those down. Some of these problems may be fixed as simple as just shutting the vehicle off and restarting the vehicle. So that may not fix it. You may have to do something called a global reset or a hard reset. Now, don't think this is something I made up, dealerships actually have their technicians do this, it's in some repair manuals, and under some special policies. We're gonna disconnect the battery, disconnect the negative terminal. Take that off for a little while. And you don't wanna hook it right back up. In your vehicle, throughout the vehicle, throughout all the computers, there's these little capacitors, which they act like little batteries, they store charge. And if those capacitors are still charged up, the computers are not gonna reset. So we need those capacitors to drain their charge. And there's a couple ways you can do this. One way is on older vehicles, like 2015 and older, you could take the negative terminal and just touch it to the positive terminal, and that's gonna drain those capacitors out much faster.

If you have a vehicle that has an auxiliary battery, whether it's in some type of OnStar module or some type of other modules throughout the vehicle, or you have a hybrid, or you have an electric vehicle, you don't wanna do that. So if you're not sure if you have one of those or not, just leave the negative terminal off for at least 15 minutes. If you want to leave it off for an hour, the longer the better. After the time's gone by, now we can reconnect the battery. And tighten down the terminal. Obviously, every car is a little bit different. After you tighten it down, give it a shake, make sure nothing's loose. You wanna check the positive as well. If any of the terminals are loose, that can cause some weird electrical issues, even in vehicles with not a lot of computers.

Some other things you wanna keep in mind when you're looking at the battery, see if there's any corrosion on the battery. If there's corrosion, or the battery is extremely old, maybe it's time to replace it. So the battery condition is crucial for everything running properly. All the electronics you have in your vehicle, even though you have an alternator, the battery stabilizes everything. So, if your battery is weak, it's time to change it. When doing these global resets, you need to remember that it's gonna reset the engine computer and transmission computer, so there's some adapts in there that need to be relearned. When you drive the vehicle for a while it may feel weird, but just drive it as normal as possible, eventually, those adapts will learn, and that vehicle will be back to normal. And also your radio presets and your clocks will have to be reset. But, in the long run, if it's worth it, if it fixed your problem, it's a good idea to do this.

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