Yahoo Autos Can You Solve The Mystery Of A Chevy Silverado HD That Kept Blowing Fuse Blocks?
Owners of old BMWs are no strangers to getting stranded and having to wait for a tow, but drift car driver Andrew May was caught off-guard when the Chevy Silverado 3500 HD that tows his BMW E36 mysteriously broke down. The pickup refused to start when Andrew and his family were at a drift competition in Englishtown, New Jersey, and their truck troubles only got worse from there.
You won’t believe what turned out to be the problem in the relatively new Chevy, which was repaired months later and after a great deal of trouble. First, we’re inviting readers to guess what was actually wrong with the dually, which baffled Andrew, his drift support crew and Chevrolet’s dealership techs alike.
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But the May family’s 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 3500 HD is the beating heart of the operation, ferrying the family and drift car to competitions and exhibitions from the East to West Coast on a regular basis. The Chevy has a 6.6-liter Duramax turbodiesel V8 and 10-speed Allison transmission. It has 84,000 miles on the odometer, so it’s barely broken in. And it’s a Silverado High Country, meaning it has all the niceties on top of its mechanical bona fides.
One day, after putting the BMW into a concrete wall while drifting, Andrew’s wife went to fetch the Silverado but the truck wouldn’t start. Andrew was stuck performing a bit of triage, juggling a track-side repair using two other duallys to pull out his BMW’s collapsed shock tower while dealing with the dead truck. He figured it was an electrical issue, maybe related to the battery or starter.
After the mayhem of the race and the BMW repair, Andrew got the truck to a dealer in New Jersey where it spent the next ten days. The folks at E-Town were nice enough to move the family’s RV to a lot where they could stay while the truck was undergoing repairs. Temperatures would reach 100 degrees, and the Mays were down on power and water. Not ideal.
The (first) dealership confirmed there was no power going to the starter, and the culprit seemed to be a solid-state 550 amp fuse that went out. But replacing it would require swapping out the whole fuse block, and, no, it wasn’t covered under warranty as it wasn’t powertrain-related. The dealer put in a new starter and fuse block and the Mays made it to their hometown of Atlanta, Georgia.
About a week later, disaster struck again. The Silverado started having the same issues, as Andrew tells me:
And it kept doing the same thing. It kept blowing this fuse, the solid state fuse, and no one could figure out why. They swapped out the fuse block again. There was a few times where they think, ‘O.K., it’s fixed.’ I go get it, and then the same day I have to bring it back or it just doesn’t start.
The second dealer told Andrew the starter seemed to be OK but they swapped it out anyway. Ditto the fuse block. Andrew was heading to the West Coast soon, so he played it safe, and asked for a spare fuse block in case the truck broke down. God forbid in the middle of nowhere — in stupid big Texas or the Southwest.
Andrew went on, telling me:
