dwoodward

Car- 2003 C32, 160k miles
Symptom- after some amount of warming up, the car throws an on again, off again "Hood open" malfunction at random. Has never happened with the car cold, only after 30+ minutes of driving.

While you're all getting wound up to tell me I have a bad / loose hood sensor and that I need to search for things, Yeah did that, and I did not see anything that matched my particular set of conditions:

1. The hood sensor is new; less than a year old;
2. The hood sensor is currently zip-tied with the switch closed (and if I understand correctly from posts I did find on this topic, this is an "normally closed" switch, so that means the circuit is open;
3. The hood sensor is not connected to the wiring harness at all; in fact
4. The hood sensor has been sitting on my desk for a week, with no change in behavior from the car.

So, those things said, I'm really sure it's not the switch.

One thing I will note is when I pulled the sensor, there was a nick in the wiring right at the connector (see photo). So the theories I have to work with are:

1. There's an intermittent short somewhere else in that wiring; or
2. the wire with the nicked insulation is the signal wire, and grounding it directly to chassis somehow damaged the SAM (which doesn't explain intermittent behavior?); or
3. I don't have an option 3. That's why I'm posting here.