It is a sad testament to our infrastructure here in the US (and Wisconsin in particular) that the roads are in such poor repair that it caused my throttle body electrical connector to work itself loose while driving today.

I've had problems with this connector before and I devised a stainless steel "set screw" affair to hold the male and female parts together tightly. This worked well for a couple of years now.

This afternoon I started to notice the classic symptoms - random high idle, slight intermittent surging while at speed and, most telling, an audible random fast "clicking" of the VVT solenoid as it goes haywire. At idle with the hood open the engine sounds awful when this is going on - lots of clattering in the cam area like it's about to drop a valve. I had a pending code for High Idle.

Sure enough, as soon as I wiggled the wires leading to the connector the engine went into full freak out mode - ASC/TRAC fault, Limp Mode, CEL with a couple of throttle body codes and it stalled.

It does not take much at all for the connections at this connector to fault, the connector itself seemed tight and good but wiggling the wire harness leading to the connector produced the problem.

Some electrical cleaner, a reseating of the connector and, this time, a zip tie to support the electric harness a little better and she was happy as always.

 

+ 1 on the zip tie. I have put 5000 miles on the 10 cent repair.