Help, my truck won't turn off, among other things

I'm not the original owner, but it was basically 6 months old when I purchased it and in pristine condition. The floor area gets wet because the truck is parked outside, and every time you get in, during the winter, some amount of snow is tracked into the truck, which melts as the cab warms up, and then invariably freezes again when re-parked. It doesn't have a chance to completely dry out as the ice inside doesn't sublimate, or the liquid water evaporate fast enough to clear until late spring. The causality all makes sense now, there is likely electrically conductive nutrients (salts etc from dirt/ road grime) that make their way into the matting as well, , and then its a downhill drip from the wires under the dashboard where the carpet meets them to the wire harness plugs, which have nothing to keep the rollercoaster out on the back of them. Its a shitty design and an obvious flaw some engineer should have picked up on.

For reference, in the electrical industry (mine) you install a slack drop behind inlets in service entrance weather-head to prevent this exact problem (called a drip loop), because, again, water exists on planet earth and electricity doesn't play well with it (especially as it exists in nature, since it's not distilled pure water without electrolytes - which plants crave by the way).

 

Do you use floor rubber mats?

 

Get electrical contact cleaner and have add it. Good luck

 

no, unfortunately, I'm just using the factory floor mats that came with the truck stock and not the required add-on/upgrade for functional breaking, ESC and engine control. I'll have to read the fine print next time and get the applicable DLC.

To be clear, it's not like there is or ever was standing water on the floor boards, this is just occasional moisture, that when the truck warms up, the carpet would feel semi-damp.

 

I hate to tell you this... but you need Weathertech/husky mats.

With the rubber OEM mats, if i would go up hill, the lack of lip would let the salty water pour into the carpet, right infront of the seat. When i lifted the seat to install a stereo, i found a few handfuls of dried salt. that was nice. Bought weathertech's the next day. now my carpet is dry. i can pour the weathertechs out if they get filled up.

Going to do the vinegar trick to clean up the corrosion? i'm sure electrical contact cleaner would help as well.

 

I only liked this post for the Idiocracy reference. Good job keeping a sense of humor through this.

I've thought about squirting dielectric grease in those connections as preventative measures, but I'm not sure if that would cause other issues.

 

dielectric grease does the lord's work. it keeps water away. a saviour for 80's toyota connections where the seals on connectors are lackluster.

 

Why the fuck would you need a drip loop on an interior body harness. Toyota didn’t cause your problem. Get some weather tech floor liners, if your tracking snow and water inside your cab

 

How can wet feet possibly cause that much damage. I bet that truck had water damage before you bought it. I would clean the connections the best you can then cover them with dielectric grease and trade that truck in ASAP.

 

I wasn't suggesting a full on drip loop, I'm making musings from a product design standpoint, which is all about risk calculation and mitigation. An extra inch of wire that causes a bend after the fabric touches the wire but before the harness would prevent my scenario from playing out, as would 4 cents worth of silicone on the back of the harness. Hell, trimming the carpet and matting back a few inches to avoid contact would as well.

They had options at the design phase that would have resulted in a better product, that's all I'm saying. My scenario would not be prevented 100% by aftermarket floormats, because the design is the way it is, but why should they have to be? Sure I can take steps going forward to try and limit it from happening in the future, with a better understanding of how stuff exists in the panels, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating - this poses a serious safety and reliability hazard. If warming up a cab after an epic snowmachining event (again, this is Alaska, snowmobiles are those dangly things you make with cutout paper and hang over a crib) has the potential to cause a short that disables your abs and numerous other systems on the 3 hour drive home and you get into a wreck or are stranded, that's kind of a big deal.

End of the day, I'll fix it, but it definitely caught me off guard that my lauded taco had something so obvious overlooked. Maybe I'm overoptimistic, my reality is informed by one of my best friends, who is a safety engineer. Her job is literally to discover problems and then assign dollar values to employees and the GPs' lives, then figure out what costs more: fixing the problem or paying out in wrongful death lawsuits... and the math on this would be easy. (If you didn't know this is a thing, at literally every company, my condolences, we live in a fucked up work, welcome)

 

That location of the harness and plugs is not unique for Tacoma. Most of modern toyota models have those plugs there and Alaska is not the only place with the snow.
Those green crusties are the product of the prolong (years) water/moisture damage.

 

a real bummer sorry to hear it. great read to inform other owners about this problem. i am not sure where youre located and how cold it gets, but in winter in some parts of Canada we are told to not wash our cars because of the moisture. unless you have a garage where it can dry with a fan / heater right away.

hope that you are able to find a mechanic or some shop that can do the work for cheaper. it doesnt make sense to me why they would replace the entire harness unless the whole thing is compromised. perhaps see about just replacing elements that appear damaged and relate to the errors you are seeing before plunging into the whole harness replacement?

i agree that both things can be true, there are things we can do to prevent these troubles and toyota ought to do something about build flaws reported by owners.
good luck and again sorry to hear about this shitty situation.

 

The green stuff is actually blue and is just the brand of ice melt my employer uses, we track it into our lobby constantly.

 

So, my plugs had the same green look. I'm guessing mine had a leak since new, but it didn't become an issue until I had to park outside in the rain for a few months since the garage was filled with new cabinets and appliances for a kitchen remodel. When it dried out for a few days, the problems went away. When it rained again, the problems came back.

On RVs they can check for leaks by pressurizing them and spraying a soapy solution on the exterior seams, I'm not sure if there's anything like that for finding leaks in vehicles.

 

Yea, I'm pretty confident I can get it back up to snuff, I'll thoroughly dry everything out, get some weatherized floor mats, employ some chemistry to remove the corrosion on both sides of the terminations and polish pins as necessary and slap it all back together. I'll probably take a utility knife to the upper edges of the carpeting as well to future proof the fix. I'm just glad I didn't let them do their exploratory surgery, it took 4 weeks for them to do a simple resistance test and look for the shorts. ‍

 

The color of the oxidation of the copper pins has nothing to do with the ice melt color. This is the color of copper oxide CuO

 

CuO is black. But I will concede that I'm colorblind to green, so perhaps Cu2O is what I'm seeing but it definitely looked blue to my trichromat friends.

edit: Possibly copper II carbonate, eitherway, its a base, and should dissolve in acid, it's semantics at this point.

 

These wont protect from the issue you are having?