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Just a life rant here. One of my employees found a great deal on a living room set on facebook marketplace, first come first serve, but she didn't have a way to transport any of it. I stepped up and offered to help her move it with my truck and trailer.


Afterwards I went to unhook the trailer. I kept the truck running as I unplugged the brake light connector. Just as I unplug it my truck sputters and stalls. Well, that's not good. It stalls 6 more times on my 12 block drive home. Living in the rural Midwest all mechanics are closed for the weekend, and I don't own my own diagnostic machine to figure out what just happened. I turned to Google.

Apparently, my vehicle has a non-zero chance of having an electrical fault when you unplug a trailer if the truck is running when you disconnect. This can either burn out a fuse, totally fry a transmission communication module, or just scramble some coding so the transmission doesn't know what to do. After some trouble shooting, I learned that I could reset the computer by disconnecting the battery for 30 minutes.

Modern tech everyone. Man, I just want to punch an engineer at General Motors right now.

Is this the sort of thing that’s a design fault, or something gone wonky since you bought it?

That very much sounds like a design flaw.

 Jadenim wrote:
That very much sounds like a design flaw.

Yeah, design flaw. It's a low chance of it ever happening though. If anyone's ever read the owners manual for a TV or computer, it tells you to power down the device and unplug it before attaching/detaching other devices. NOBODY ever does it though. I think this is the automotive equivalent. I just crapped out with my luck.