Hey all,

TL;DR: Car experienced power loss. Ignition didn't stop firing when pulled over. Was able to limp car home. Car will not start now (not even crank). All electrical in car seems to be working.

My GF and I just moved to Northern CA.

We took the (her) 2013 Lexus RX 350 (AWD) from the central valley up, into the Sierras, to ski at Kirkwood.
The car did a great job navigating the snow covered road up to the base of the mountain (7776' elevation) and back out of the snow covered mountains.

When we were 20 miles from home the car suddenly lost power. Gauges went dark and the maintenance screen said either "check power system" or " Check power steering system".
We pulled over to see if shutting the car off would maybe help the situation. (the car had gone up to 8K feet and back in one day, so it had worked fairly hard). Upin pulling over the ignition continued to fire, even after powering down the car, with the key outside of the vehicle.

We got back in the car and were able to limp it the remaining 20 miles home at 35 mph without another power loss. We opened the hood just to take a look and could notice an almost burning electrical smell.I am thinking this is the starter due to the rapid / continuous firing.
All electrical components seem to work fine, lights, seats, locks.

CEL is on.
Disconnected the battery for 5 mins and the code persisted.

I just ordered a scan tool to read the code but it wont arrive until Friday.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

 

Any chance that snowmelt (water) penetrated the hood seals and got into the engine bay? Wet engine bay components can cause a limp mode condition in a heartbeat.

 

It's very odd but my wife and I just experienced a similar issue with our 2010 Lexus RX. We were driving back from the pharmacy during a pretty intense snow fall. I started slowing down and as I approached a stop light all the gauges went dark and then powered back on without the motor turning off. Once the gauges went back on every warning light came on. The check engine light went on and the multi function display told us AWD was disabled, brake malfunction, check brake lamp. After that the car drove very poorly in limp mode and it had issues with idling and shifting.

I got home and plugged in a cheap ODB-2 scanner and got some very generic codes P0705, and P0500 and reset the codes. They immediately came back and I parked the car for the night. Next morning I started it up and it was fine. Plugged car into laptop with Techstream and pulled some more codes indicating an issue with the STOP lamp circuits. I dropped the car off at my mechanics for him to take a look at. Very strange that you had a similar issue!

 

Keep in mind that a failing battery will often cause various electrical problems and throw spurious OBDII codes. How old is your battery? The factory batteries are mediocre-at-best and often seem to fail at no more than three to four years old.