2004 Explorer mysteriously stalled?

[CobraSVT302]

I was hoping someone could help me diagnose this problem...

I was driving home the other day with my family in our 2004 Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer 4.6L V8. We were going about 35-40 mph when the "check engine" light came on and soon thereafter the message center said "low oil pressure" and a few seconds later the car stalled while at speed.

We pulled to the side of the road and after a few minutes tried starting the car up again and it turned over on the first shot. I checked the oil level and it was fine, so I do not have a clue what the problem is and neither does the Ford dealership that I took it to be serviced at.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas? I am worried the problem will happen again while on the highway...

Thanks.

 

[Drewstang]

Sounds like a ground might be loose or have corrosion. Did they check all your connectors?

 

[CobraSVT302]

10-4 - they checked all the grounds and hooked the car up to their computer and no fault codes came up...

 

[BrooklynBay]

Welcome to this forum! If there was an intermittent connection, it might have erased the fault code. Check your battery terminals.

 

[belvin20]

You could have a battery going bad. In my 04 Mountaineer, I have already had to put in a new battery. When it was failing the electronics did some odd things. New battery fixed the problem. Batterys can fail at any time reguardless of age.

 

[CobraSVT302]

It has been a couple of weeks and the Explorer has not had any problems. It turns out that the tank of gas the car was running on at the time my wife bought at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike - could it have simply been bad gas that caused the problem?

 

[cyoung2203]

Question, did you have the cruise control, and using the deceleration button whilst going down a hill?

Mine does it on the exact same hill, every time. Going from a 100kmh zone to a 60kmh zone. Down hill...with cruise on but decelerating, the exact same thing happens to me.

Craig

 

[jlet19]

Ha. that same thing happen to my v6 limited. i was using cruise control at about 33-35 and same messages came up. fired it back up 10 minutes later. had ford tow it from my house the next day and they foudn nothing wrong with it.

no problems since

 

[jacek82]

Samething happened to me about 4 times, if I'm driving in a driving down or up hill in cruise, more in downhill . What happens if your rpms get to low with the converter locked and its right in between when it shifts gear the rpms get to low just stall out. The funny thing is I have actually seen the car downshift in the sometimes. Brought the problem to fords attention number of times but they could never find or reproduce the problem. My friend which is a Ford Tech thinks it could be a sticky valve body. But since it only happened in a hilly area about 50 miles north of chicago its to hard to reproduce to actually fix.

 

[blitzk]

This is a fairly common thing if you're using cruise control... at around 35mph if you push the deceleration button (even on level ground) the rpm's go very low and stalls the car.

Obviously it shouldn't do this, but it does!

 

[jrford]

We own a 2004 Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer 4.6L V8 AWD too. Bought it at a year old and 6k. Then a few months later or about a year or so ago when my wife was driving she had a similar problem it stalled out. She said it flashed Low Oil wasn't sure. Restarted without anyproblems, waited over a year for it to reoccur, never did. No Cruise control at the time, only doing about 35mph or so.

 

[skawtland]

Sounds somewhat familiar. Only had our 04 Explorer for a little over a week, but I did have it stall in town. I was doing 35mph, Cruise Control turned on (lazy bugger!) and it was a long slightly downhill road. It felt like the transmission attempted to go into 5th gear, and thus stall because that would equate to -99999 RPM! and so it just hiccuped and died quietly. The thing runs so quietly anyway, I didn't even notice it had stalled until I happened to look down at the dash and the Check Gauges light was on. The steering wheel on an Explorer is no light weight to turn with no power I found out!

Now I'm a bit tentative to turn on cruise control in town, which is terrible for me as it goes against all that I stand for... lazyness! :

I suppose I could always disengage Overdrive. I will try to repeat the stall, just to see if there were any messages popping up prior to the stall that I did not notice, or to see if the transmission did engage 5th.

 

[mizzej]

It has been a couple of weeks and the Explorer has not had any problems. It turns out that the tank of gas the car was running on at the time my wife bought at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike - could it have simply been bad gas that caused the problem?

O