I've tried researching this a number of places but before i started going down the diagnosis rabbit hole i figure i would ask here.

My wife's 2001 Honda Civic 1.7L has a bad habit of dying while we're driving. She first noticed the issue late last summer when it did it a few times in a row. I started driving the car so i could experience it dying but it never happened to me. We went 9 months without it dying even once. In the last two weeks its done it like 10 times and its quite unsafe but we're still not sure what the problem is.

The last time it happened we could not get it started. Turns out the battery was bad so we replaced it. At the same time we had the alternator tested and its fine.

When it happens the car just loses all power (horsepower that is, not electrical power). If you keep trying to give it gas, very seldomly it will give you an extra little puff of power but for the most part its just dead as a door nail. The car coasts to a stop. When this happened to me yesterday I tried starting it and it just turned a few times with no life. I had a feeling the loss of power was because of a loss of fuel. So i turned the ignition on and off a few times to prime the fuel system and then it fired up easy peasy.

Usually when this happens you can get it started again and keep going for miles and miles before it will happen again. But yesterday after it happened for the third time, it started acting really strange. My wife accidentally stalled the car at a toll booth. The car started up just fine but when she tried to accelerate there was no power and the idle was pretty sporadic. We pulled over and just observed it idling for a while until it smoothed out. Then she revved the engine to about 2500 rpm and it would start to cough and back fire (or at least what sounded like a backfire in the exhaust manifold). She turned the car off and we just sat there for a while. After about 10 mins we tried it again. Same thing happened. After about another 10 mins we tried it again and it worked fine. We proceeded to drive home which was about 300 miles.

During the remaining 300 miles of our trip the car acted completely fine except occasionally it would lose power for a split second and you would just feel a little lurch. For the remainder of the trip it never died, backfired, idled strange or did anything out of the ordinary besides the occasional hiccup.

It does it more when its hot (90+ F)

My first thought was fuel pump. Also, We've had a CEL for system bank 2 too lean for a while now. The CEL comes on and off with no real change in how the car drives.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. I at least want to know where I should start.

Thanks!

 

This does sound like the fuel pump. The crank sensor can cause similar problems but it should eventually throw a code. It is a shame to just throw parts at it but with a highly intermittent problem it's hard to diagnose for sure.

 

right, i meant to check the crank shaft sensor today. I checked the cam sensor the other day to make sure all the connections were tight/clean. All looked to be in good order.