I'm having trouble figuring out what is going on here. My wife has a 2013 journey with the 3.6L. This is what's happening, I recently took her car to the store not 30 minutes before this happened and everything was fine. She left to get dinner and didn't make it two houses away when the car went to battery save mode. When she turned around and pulled in to the drive way she noticed smoke so turned off the car.
I got up the next morning and put a new battery in, when I touched the ground cable it got hot real fast, that's when I smelt the burning. I disconnected the battery, as it wasn't right just sitting there, and looked under the hood and saw smoke coming from the alternator itself.
I went to autozone to get another one as I just replaced the original one 3 years ago. Lifetime warranty. Put the new alternator on, connected the battery, everything's good, nothing's getting hot. Start the car, battery light is on. Grab my voltmeter and it shows 11.98 at the battery, ask the wife to give it some gas, it drops to 11.95. I check it at the alternator, same thing. I end up taking it to autozone so they can check it on the car, can't check it, battery is too low.
Agrees with me that the new alternator could be bad out of the box. So I remove the new alternator and take it to them to test. Their tester is down, but he's going to go ahead and get me another alternator. Won't be in for a day or two.
In the mean time I take the new one I just pulled off the car to oriellys and have them test it. Passed the test 3 times. I'm still going to put the new one on when it gets here, but if that doesn't work I'm out of ideas. Am I overlooking anything? Is there something else I could check? The car only has 55,000 miles on it.
