So I was driving in the rain today, it was raining cats and dogs. Went through a couple sizable puddles in a row, noting do deep but noticeable. Coming out of one of the puddles my battery light came on, followed by the check charging system light, then the power steering light came on. At the stop light all the warning lights came and the gps display turned off, I thought the car died but it didn't. Thankfully I was two blocks away from my in-laws house, lights were flickering on and off as I drove there and I had no power steering. Pulled into the driveway and left the car for a couple of hours.

I figured it might be my belt sense I lost all functions, got back to the car hoping to find a snapped belt, but no such luck. The belt was still in tact and spinning as the car ran. I started the car and no warning lights were on, I even had power steering, so I decided to drive it around the block, but I quickly lost power steering again and the battery light came back on and read "check charging system". I am at lose as to what to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. The water couldn't of been more then a foot deep but i am pretty sure that that's what caused the problem, but I have no idea... any thoughts?????

 

Sounds like you need a new alternator

 

Start off by making sure all your splash shields are good under the car. I've had this happened before on me in a matrix that wasn't mines. Scared the living souls out of me and when I asked the owner; he brushed it off as water and explained that it happens often to him because of the belt being wet. It basically turns everything that went wrong on you. When it slips, the system thinks that the alternator is not working properly because it is not charging. Everything else stops also such as power steering, and ac system( dont know if you have defrosters on, but can you recall if the fans stopped?).

By all means, I'm not saying brush this off, but from the way you described it.. after leaving it for a while and it started up fine until you started driving again in the rain I assume; the same thing happened. So it could be the water drying out, etc.. I'd say double check the belt again and even the tensioner and all the pulleys that rotated around or on the belt for any moisture/water.

 

Sounds to me like you got the belt wet and it started slipping (reason you lost everything at once). With the moisture in the air, the belt isn't going to get dry all that quickly since the water will be down in the grooves and what not. It may also have a bit of road grime/mud/oil from what ever was in the water that you drove through.

Keep an eye on it for a few days and see what happens. I wouldn't go buying parts just yet. Just make sure the belt is still tight (tensioner didn't fail).

 

A wet serpentine belt shouldn't cause anything like this to happen. First, one of the jobs of the battery is to provide power when the alternator isn't producing enough power, so some belt slip shouldn't cause all the electronics to turn off (also, if water compromised the belt's ability to rotate pulleys that severely, the lack of oil pressure would be noticed long before the battery died since the serpentine belt also powers the oil pump) . Second, there's no way a splash of water would completely eliminate all contact between the belt and alternator pulley – at most, it would cause a brief and small drop in alternator output. Third, even if the alternator completely stopped working, there's no way the car would willingly cut power to the power steering. I could understand killing the NAV screen and AC to conserve power, but not the power steering – there's no point in conserving battery power if it dramatically increases the likelihood of a crash

 

Oil pump is driven directly by the crank... Not the serpentine belt.

Crank pulley gets wet while trying to drive the alternator, ac compressor, and water pump.. crank pulley will slip the belt as it's easier to slip then to turn all of that while wet (tensioner doesn't get nearly that tight). I've had it happen on multiple cars (typically missing the lower splash guard).

However... I did forget that these cars run electronic power steering.. makes me wonder if the under hood fuse block got wet or something along those lines.

 

Shít that's right. When I was visualizing the serpentine belt I was thinking "crank pulley, water pump, idler pulley, oil pump, alternator, tensioner"... not sure why I thought oil pump instead of AC compressor

But that's interesting, both times after I replaced my water pump I used a garden hose to clean the residual coolant off the front of the engine block and the splash guards and then drove the car right afterwards, and I didn't notice or hear any belt slip either time. Maybe it's because the serpentine belt was new or fairly new in both cases.

 

The only time I've had it happen is when I've hit standing water. More then likely, the difference is clean water vs oily contaminated water... But who knows.

The Ops situation is an odd one. I wonder if the problem went away.

 

Yeah, hopefully OP will come back and post an update