While driving back from Texas in my '04 STi I had something a bit odd happen... I was cruising down the highway at about 95mph at around 11pm when suddenly everything electrical shut off (headlamps included), the motor stopped, and I was slowing down. I shoved the clutch in (motor turning without real oil pressure is bad) and tried to start the car. Nothing. After stopping on the middle of the highway (I wasn't going to risk trying to find the shoulder), I turned the key off, waited 10 seconds, and turned it back on. I was back in business.

Does anyone have a clue as to what the f*ck could've caused this? Granted this was back in August of '04, but I'm still curious to this day. The lady at Subaru jokingly suggested aliens, I had to laugh.

 

thats wack ive crused at about 100 in my legacy for a while without anything like that happen dont know wut to tell u

 

I've never had this happen again, even while cruising at 100mph. It may be worth mentioning I was on cruise control when it happened, and there was no CEL.

 

do you have a turbo timer?

 

2 words: aliens...

 

I’ve seen that happen to a Mazda 626 and a Toyota 4Runner. Neither of them was going above 70MPH. I was wondering about the same thing... What happened? But since I was not able to reproduce the problem, couldn't really do anything about it.

The only thing I could think of is, like all computers, it crashed. a neutron from the atmosphere might have hit a data that has no parity or ECC protection and caused a silent data corruption, which caused a shut-down of the system. Depending on the size of the memory, things like this happens more than you think.

Leo

 

Not at the time, no.

 

Solar activity could also have caused this. Anyone know where to check for past solar flares?

 

ohh well there goes my idea....

 

exactly what I was thinking

 

Were you in Nevada at the time?

 

+2 thats the first thing I thought of when you said everything electrical just shut down all of a sudden.....all I could think of was "Close encounters of the Third kind."

-Ted

 

I've had a similar symptom but it needed a fuse, I'd have the harness inspected, sometime a lead to a sensor gets chaffed or melted causing an intermittent short, cool it off for a little bit and it heals, but it's gonna happen again - at least if that is what it is...

 

if you were anywhere close to las vegas then it was the feds.

Last year they ****ing did this and people's cars would not unlock with keyless entry systems.

 

I think it was in New Mexico, can't quite remember. One of those whacky alien encounters I guess. Glad I remember everything around that time, don't want to end up an abductee.