Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
Turn the Key and Nothing Happens
There is a particular silence Crossfire owners learn to dread: turn the key to START, and nothing happens. No crank, no click, no complaint — the dash lights sit there and the car declines to participate. Then, an hour later or the next morning, it starts like it never happened. This chapter is about that silence, and it begins by burning down the most popular piece of advice given for it, because following that advice will have you dismantling a part of the car that does not exist.
The Relay Story You Will Be Told — and Why It’s Wrong
Ask around and you will hear that the starter relay is a little black cube in a fuse and relay box in the trunk, that the relays hide on the underside of a rear module, and that the fix is to flip the module over, swap the starter relay with the identical horn relay beside it, and drive away. It is a wonderful story. It describes a Mercedes. It does not describe this car.
Here is the Crossfire as the factory built it. The car’s relays live in the Relay Control Module, and the Relay Control Module lives in the control module box on the passenger side of the ENGINE COMPARTMENT — under the hood, not in the trunk. The manual calls the RCM a solid state device containing internal relays — air pump, engine control, traction system, horn, fuel pump, and their companions — sealed inside a module that, in the factory’s words, cannot be serviced and must be replaced as a unit. There are no cube relays in it to pull, none to swap, and no module in the trunk to flip over. The horn relay and the starter’s relay circuitry are neighbors on a circuit board, not twins in a row of sockets. (Owners do repair these boards — re-flowing their failing solder joints is the whole subject of Do You Have a Spare RCM? — but that is surgery, not a swap test.)
The Start Chain, Link by Link
When you turn the key, the request travels: ignition switch, through the SKREEM’s immobilizer approval — the key must be recognized before anything downstream is allowed — through the transmission range switch, which must agree the car is in Park or Neutral, to the relay circuitry that feeds the starter solenoid, and only then to the starter motor itself. Total silence means the chain broke before the solenoid. A starter motor that receives its signal and fails makes noise about it — a click, a groan, a grind. Silence is an upstream verdict, and it narrows the suspect list to the chain itself: switch, SKREEM, range switch, relay module, and the wiring between them — with the battery’s voltage standing behind all of it, because a tired battery fails this chain at its weakest link first, usually on a hot day or after the car has sat.
The Tests That Actually Exist
Test one is free and it is the best one: the next time the car refuses, hold the key in START and move the shifter — try Neutral, and try wiggling the selector slightly in Park while the key is held. If the engine suddenly cranks, the transmission range switch just confessed. It is a common failure on this car, it feels exactly like a dead relay, and no relay story will ever find it because the relay was never the problem.
Test two is the battery, tested the way How to Diagnose No Starts insists: voltage at rest is a rumor; voltage while the key is held at START is the fact. A battery that sags under the request produces precisely this intermittent nothing, especially after sitting, and it is the cheapest item on the list. Test three is pattern recognition: does the failure follow heat — a hot engine bay after a drive — or follow sitting for days? Heat-and-restart patterns point at electronics and solder, the RCM’s known weakness; sitting patterns point at the battery and its connections. And test four, when the chain must be proven link by link, is the meter at the starter solenoid’s trigger wire while a helper holds the key: signal present and no crank means the starter itself finally takes the blame; signal absent means walk back up the chain you just read.
Where the RCM Fits
Because the starting circuitry runs through the Relay Control Module’s board, an RCM with cracked solder joints produces this exact symptom — intermittent, temperature-sensitive, infuriating — and it produces it alongside cousins: a fuel pump that sometimes does not prime, a horn or fan with a mind of its own. One relay misbehaving is a relay. Several unrelated electrical functions taking turns failing is a board. That distinction is the RCM chapter’s whole argument, and it is why the spare-RCM habit exists among owners of these cars.
The Bottom Line
Turn the key and nothing happens: the fault is upstream of the starter, in a chain of switch, SKREEM, range switch, and relay module — and on this car the relays are sealed inside a module under the hood, not hiding as cubes in the trunk waiting to be swapped. Test in Neutral, test the battery under load, read the pattern of when it fails, and prove the solenoid’s signal with a meter before buying anything. The silence is information. Spend it before you spend money.
