Please bear with me, this is a long post with a lot of context.

I have a 4.0L 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee that occasionally is stalling, sputtering, hard starts, and misfiring. I will be driving without any issues and then all of a sudden the engine begins to sputter, seems like my rpms drop very low to the point of almost stalling, speedo gauge bounces on the sputter, fuel gauge sometimes will move around. Then next thing I know, I stall out. I have no CEL or codes.

On restart, or attempted restart I have noticed that my fuel gauge will either go to the proper gas level or stays at 0. When it stays at 0, the engine will not turnover. When the gauge moves to the proper level, it usually starts back up. Sometimes when I shift to drive, I will stall out either when driving or right when I shift to drive.

This began happening following my drive across state several weeks back. During this drive my muffler broke off and was hanging, I ended up finding a guy who helped me cut it the rest of the way off. On my return trip back, when I was about 1 hour away from home, the stutter, stalling issue happened for the first time. After an hour of getting going and stalling out, I eventually wire brushed off my battery terminals and added dielectric grease and this seemed to help me get home. After this I got marine style terminals and wire lugs to clean up the cables. I replaced the spark plugs at this point too (Autolite 985 coppers). For what it’s worth my catalytic converter was also stolen last year. For right now I am running a thrush on the car until I can resolve these above issues.

The sputtering and stalling led my dad and I to think this could be an issue with the fuel system, so either fuel filter or fuel pump. We then went to test the fuel pressure and realized my fuel rail did not have a Schrader valve…thanks Chrysler. So we got a fuel rail from the junkyard that had a Schrader valve. We cleaned all the injectors and put them on the new rail. Pressure read as 49-50 psi, so right where it should be.

After adding on the thrush and the new fuel rail, everything seemed to be good. I had no issues for the last week until today, where the previous symptoms of stalling and sputtering came back.

Let me know if you have any ideas on what could be causing this.

 

I know this is a few years behind but I recently had this issue a few months back and just fixed it (highly positive). Wound up replacing alot of things that didn't fix it but found out that the wiring harness behind the engine inbetween the firewall was beginning to be burnt causing the studdering. You have to be looking for it to find it as you have to twist it around to see it (at least for me). Ever since I seated that above the engine and fixed the harness it's been running fine.