This evening my son had a catastrophic failure to proceed with the 2004 Sportswagon. He described it as a sudden loss of power, the dashboard lit up like 4th of July and the car coasted to a stop. After waiting 30 seconds or so and having removed the key from the ignition, he was able to restart the car which then seemed to be fixed in 1st gear, or via manually shifting 4th gear, in order to get off the highway.
When I bought this car there were lots of fault codes and lights up, which after exhaustive diagnostics, seemed to point to unstable voltages and thereby causing the faults. We replaced the battery with a top quality brand and rated at 700cca
and all has been well for the past month but now this happened. My son is having the car recovered to our mechanic who fixed it last time, but I'm suspecting the electrical system once again, I had found a website that allowed a free download in PDF format of the entire electrical system for these cars, but now I need it, I can't find it.
If any of you have a link to this site I'd appreciate it, or if any of you are familiar with this problem and can point me in the right direction I would be eternally grateful. Anything, in short, that can assist my mechanic to hone in on the area he should be addressing rather than start all over from scratch. He's a great mechanic, but any help I can give him to pinpoint this problem will obviously save his frustration and my wallet some!
Thanks Guys!

 

Going to need far more data. Battery test. Codes.

 

The forum Download Centre has the following PDF's:

X-Type Electrical Guide - 2002 Model Year
http://www.mediafire.com/download/xo...Guide_2002.pdf

X-Type Electrical Guide -2004 Model Year
http://www.mediafire.com/download/xo...Guide_2002.pdf

Before digging too deeply into the electrical system, such a complete failure could be the main battery leads loose or breaking up (see terminals circled in red):


(click on the image to enlarge it)

This has been reported as a regular issue.

Graham

 

+1 on battery cables, replace them both, dont bother testing them... Just replace

 

It didn't happen to be heavily raining at the time that incident happened to your son, did it?

 

I live east of the OP. They had a nasty spring snowstorm yesterday.

 

Hi Alfadude, yes heavy rains yesterday!

 

Maybe it is a wet TCM. Do a search on here about that as there is tons of information on it. If that got wet that could cause all sorts of codes to pop up. Kind of a common issue.