My 2 Year Old Drove My Car, And Broke It.

NYSpeed Automotive
1

Alternate Title:
Could Low Voltage Kill a Head Unit?

Backstory: I have a Kenwood ddx7015 (2 din screen w/nav)…its several years old. Everytime someone works on the car, like a dealer…screen is dead when it is returned to me. I have always either pulled the radio fuse from the fuse block in the engine bay or neg on the battery to “reset” and that brings it back to life. One of those odd annoyances i never really understood.

Anyway…so yesterday I let my 2yo “drive” the car. He sits in the front seat and I let him flick all of the switches and spin the steering wheel. A couple of hours later, I go to turn on the car, radio comes on for a good 3 seconds then goes blank.
My son apparently left the headlights on, which drained the battery all the way down to 6.5v

So I jumped and recharged the battery. All is good. Except the stereo no workie now. It has an led that blinks with power off to thwart thieves and that IS blinking. It also ejects a disc. But no buttons work, no lights, no beeps and no audio. The whole screen is dark. Checked fuses on the head unit itself. Could the sudden drop to 6.5v have killed it?

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did you have someone remove the jumper cables as soon as it started, or did u wait and do it yourself?

you can fry stuff with jumper cables if you dont pull thm immediatly after the car starts,

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it was one of those remote jump start jammies i got from radio shack. Started the car, rev’d for 2 seconds and then jumped out and removed the cables.

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yeah then that probably wasnt the problem, maybe it was just its time.
you could try disconecting the power and putting it back to it . other than that I dont know.

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alright well, i went back to basics and checked everything. murphy’s law, the acc line was ripped from a shoddy attempt at a harness. i soldered it all, and it still didn’t work. murphy alive and well… the acc line was now not even feeding power. I checked all fuses and can’t find a single one that blew.
So i tapped into a cig line for the acc line signal. I believe the unit is still powered directly from the battery, but just uses the acc to signal it should turn on. well, i hope anyway. no fuses blowing.

anyway, karter you didn’t exactly fix my problem but you did get me thinking to go back to basics and check everything. thanks. I don’t know why everyone rags on you here. maybe i am too new, but you seem ok.

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traced it back just now to the 1 fuse I DIDN’T check. Why is that always the case?
It is one labeled ACC and that feeds IGN to the stereo.
Funny how the others labeled RADIO and RADIO2 didn’t blow.