Good afternoon everyone! Just joined the forum today and was hoping to find some helpful guidance.

I ran into a pretty major issue this morning with my 2016 LR4 HSE Lux. My wife went outside to warm up the truck today. She came back in and said it had shut down completely and smelled like something was burning.

I inspected things and confirmed there was ZERO power. Based on the burnt electrical smell, my guess is that the harness melted and crossed somewhere. However, after removing the air inlet duct and physically inspecting what I could… I found no damage. Couldn’t see any fuses that had been blown. My booster/tester immediately tells me there is a cross and is reading as hot.

Has anyone had a similar experience or could offer guidance? My first thought was to replace the primary wiring harness, but they seem to run between $1,200 & $1,600 usd. After recently paying a shop to replace the water pump, crossover pipe & thermostat… I’m hoping to handle this without breaking the bank.

Any insight is GREATLY appreciated!

 

Did you run a code reader on it? Any codes? That should always be first order of business. Even if you don’t have a good code reader (like a GAP IID), at least get a $20 cheapo and see if there are any major codes.

How recently did you have the waterpump/crossover/tstat changed? Both front and rear crossovers? Just trying to think about whether any of that work would have disturbed something that could cause this issue. Nothing comes to mind right now. I’d also check to make sure you have coolant in the overflow. This can cause a shut down and burning smell, but would not itself cause the no electrical power situation. Still, I’d check just to make sure.

I’m not sure what the tester is looking at or how it’s detecting a short. The harness should not melt down and short. It should be protected by a fusible element that will melt before harness is damaged from overcurrent. Obviously, the harness can get damaged by other means and short out (e.g., rodents, vibration wearing through, etc), but I don’t think there’s a way for it to draw enough power to melt down and then short without first blowing a fuse or fusable link. If a link is blown, that would give you a no power situation. Then you need to determine what caused the link to blow.

Alternator comes to mind as a possible culprit, though I haven’t heard of this before in the LR4. The alternators seam to be pretty solid, unless you have an oil leak from the passenger side valve cover that drips down onto the alternator.

You mentioned checking the junction box, but also pop off the cover for the start/stop battery on the drivers side to make sure nothing obvious is going on over on that side (main battery connects through a battery power distribution box, which has fuses and FET switches).