silverstang23

Well, I am now on my fourth alternator in my 08 GT. Just hit 62,000 miles. Anyone have any idea why my car is eating alternators. I have to stock navigation shaker system with no modifications. The car is completely stock from an electrical standpoint. Any ideas about why this is happening would be appreciated. Not sure if it's relevant but the battery was replaced around 50,000 miles.

Thanks in advance

drewsky

The 05-09's are known to eat through alternators. Replaced mine a year ago with my odo now reading 85k. Are they cheap aftermarket ones? And how is your driving style? Short (under 10 min) with a lot of shut offs and starts, or a non dd that sits in the garage a lot between drives? I've always heard they need to run for an extended ammount of time here and there to prevent this.

Simon1

If your car sits for a while and the battery gets low, not too low to notice, the alternator will have to work harder to charge the battery. If you're battery is ever low enough to be noticeable enough for you to tell, the battery should be charged by a charger and not the alternator. It will burn up the alternator.

Aftermarket alternators are also not very reliable. It's very common for them to fail.

808muscle

Man that sucks, 4 of them and only 62k miles. I have 30k miles and still on the stocker with my 2006. I guess I got lucky. Good luck. No idea as to why you keep burning them up. Are the replacements just an auto parts store item or a name brand like PA?

Chromeshadow

Did you take one apart to see what failed? There is not much in an alternator, a couple of diodes and and a few coils, all can be checked with a cheap volt/ohm meter.

Kotobuki

Had my original alternator go at about 42K. Had it rebuilt at a local shop, it went again around 60K. Put an aftermarket one off eBay (200A, I think) and it's been running strong since. Currently at 125K. There was a design defect with the originals that caused them to blow out, but I thought that got fixed for the 08+ models.

danzcool

The OEM ones were known to have issues, if you were repplacing with OEM, rebuilt of cheap aftermarket, then that would be the issue. I'm using a PA performance 200A, still have hte OEM one and it was still good when I replaced it, but besides them, I'm heard department of boost has an upgraded version that fixed whatever was weak with the OEM ones (they were saying that the OEM 6g alternators didn't like high RPMs).

Chromeshadow

If higher RPM was the problem, I would expect to see a problem in the rotor, which is pretty easy to test with a good ohmmeter.
btw, I put 195K miles on my 2000 3.8 with no problems, but they are limited to about 5,500 rpm. Centrifugal forces can be brutal!