Expert: Rob Painter - 10/1/2011

Question
hello i have a 2000 Cadillac Deville DHS. first i will tell you a little bit about the car. it has 113k miles on it i am the second owner and i have only put 8000 of the 113000 miles on it. i have owned it for almost 16 months. when i bought the car it had the classic northstar rear main oil leak. other than that there hasnt been too much trouble, except for the last month and a half or so...

shortly after it was broken into at my apartment complex things started to not work so well. they broke in through the right rear window by pulling it down. now that whole door has trouble the lock doesnt work although i can still roll the window up and down it is very jumpy like its only getting signal every other second.

but even before the break in i was having a few small problems with the car like i turned it on once and the radio wouldnt come on till i turned the car off and back on again. and sometimes the radio volume wouldnt work like i could turn it down and it would stay at the same sound level in the car.

ok so the big problem i have had is similar to that of another post on this site.
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Cadillac-Repair-806/2008/1/2000-Cadillac-DeVille-Craz

in my problem i will have no warning lights on the dash will look normal and i will be driving and after a while all of a sudden all at once the radio will turn off and all my gauge lights will go as bright as possible and my security light and traction control light come on and my gas gauge drop to E my cruse control light goes out and my steering wheel controls dont work. some times the airbag light will come on too. it will stay like that between 10 seconds to a minute and when it stops thelight dim back down and the gas gauge comes back and the trac and sec light stay on and the steering wheel buttons work and the radio sometimes comes back on and the times that it doesnt come back on i just turn it back on.
when i shut the car off and turn it back on the gauge is normal again. i think its a back ground somewhere under the dash... but i wanted to know if there is a chance it might be something simpler or if there are some simple things i can try first.

thank you so much for your time and i apologize for being long winded

Matthew

Answer
Hello,

First, the window problem is not electrical. That is mechanical. GM kept changing their configurations of window tracks, but I believe you have a plastic tape with notches that rolls the widow up and down. When forced down, the plastic will stretch and the slots in the tape can break. You probably need to take it to a service center (not  dealer) and have the chewed up plastic tape replaced.

Completely unrelated to your second problem, unless when broken into they did something to your dash not mentioned.

Now, electrical problems as you describe could be a connection issue or a ground, but either way needs to be fixed before something fries due to this surge. This is not good because for whatever reason, going from a dim situation to a fully bright is a very serious concern and then having the warning lights being fed like this means there is a circuitry issue.

I wold recommend downloading the factory manual for $30 at http://www.alldata.com. Instead of guessing, the diagnostic flow charts are there giving you quick concise information for repairing this issue. All ground locations are given and this might make the problem quick to fix.

It is just the bes solution nd you can obtain immediately.

Good luck!

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