99 Sonata cuts off

My initial guess would be the crank sensor, but that normally leaves a code. Does your code reader check for pending faults as well as faults which turn on the check engine lamp?

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Thanks Hyundai tech for your quick reply. Yes my code reader manual says it reads pending codes but I've never actually seen one (hopefully because I've never had one). I wont get a chance to look at it tho because it died on him today going to work ( both ways yesterday without a problem). He could not reach me so he had it towed to a shop. They called later in the day and said that the valve cover was leaking oil into the spark plugs and had shorted out the plugs and the coil packs. They said it would be $750 to repair. I had him call them back and ask them 1) how did 4 plugs and two coil packs short out at the same time. 2) Did they see any spark at all . 3)was there any DTC and

4)What was the odds that that was going to fix the problem? He said that they said there was no DTCs and there was a very weak spark. They got huffy on the other questions and said that was all they could find and it would fix the problem. I told him that I didn't think they had a clue as to what was wrong with it and was just throwing parts at it but at this point he didn't have a lot of options but to go along with it. What are you thoughts on this diagnosis? I sure hope for his sake that I am wrong and that this fixes the problem , but I have serious doubts. I will post the results when I hear more.

Seriously doubt it'll fix the car. Diagnosis is BS or just plain ignorance. The oil will not short the spark plugs. I don't even recommend doing the repairs if the car seems to otherwise be running normally.

Think about it. Two coils shorting out at the exact same time in three separate instances. That itself is not believable. Furthermore, if it were just one coil, it'd still run (although not very well) on just two cylinders.

Of course, I'm not confident my original post is the correct diagnosis, either. (I will say, however, that it's more likely than two coils, four plugs, and a valve cover gasket.) This car also has a primary coil side ignition monitor that can fail and prevent the coils from firing. If the shop actually found no spark but had injector pulse, the ignition monitor would be the prime suspect.

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He got the car back the next day and says it running OK now. That was a relief because we both were expecting them to come up with more $$ needed to get it working. Now it leaves me wondering if they found out early on that it was something relatively cheap and padded the bill with expensive parts/work or discovered afterwards that the initial parts/work didn't fix it but decided to eat the additional cost to save face. Or worse yet, since its an intermittent problem (it went two days in between occurring) that its not really fixed at all and will occur again at any time. I guess time will tell. Anyways, thanks again HyundaiTech for you comments. We were both on the same page.