Mark Doiron

I know only what you wrote. Since you accused dealer of not knowing anything, I assumed you had actually given them the chance to work on your Jeep. My mistake.

bill_h

The initial problems I described in the thread just went away...didn't happen again except for once in the last 5 months. Driving along with my wife (finally! A witness!) I get the chime, everything lights up and the engine dies. Drop it into Park, restart it, back into drive and that's it. Easy peasy.

That was 2 months ago.

Last night, it happened, but differently, and now I'm worried. We were in tight traffic around a stadium. This time when it happened, the restart was difficult. It had never been before. When I turned the key, there was a rattling sound like the starter couldn't engage, and the lights were flickering in time with it. Took several attempts to restart.

So maybe it IS the battery being weak? I don't know.

Checking the terminals and cables today.

How would a dealer diagnose the TIPM as the culprit, though? I don't want to drop a couple hundred bucks on something with them that they can't figure out because the problem is so intermittent.

bill_h

Apologies if necro-posting a long-dead thread is frowned upon here - I got the solution to the initial problem and figured it would be good citizenship to close the loop with how the problem was solved in case anyone searched for the same thing later.

So - the symptoms were SIMILAR to the TIPM problem, but there were two key differences:

1) I never had the associated electrical weirdness like the locks or windshield wipers happening.
2) The problem was so intermittent, and what was key was that it only happened during low-speed crawls, never anything at a cruising speed.

It turned out to be the transmission solenoid pack. This is essentially a sensor package that keeps the engine and transmission aware of each other. A fault or failure causes them to lose track of each other and results in the stall. Apparently, throwing it into Park (it's an automatic) and cycling the ignition could reset the issue, but this seemed to be a diminishing solution as the last time it happened it took multiple attempts.

The good news is that the system WILL throw a diagnostic code on this - it's an 07-series code - the shop showed it to me, so it was relatively straightforward for them to hunt it down.

It is now repaired and running fine.