If Your Dodge Caravan's Power Sliging Doors Stop Working, Consider Replacing the Battery
I've now seen this on two different cars of the same model & year and I couldn't find a reference to this specific resolution on the Internet so I figured it would be worth posting.
The symptom is simple. The power sliding door on one side or the other will stop working. I'm guessing that this problem is shared between the Dodge Caravan and the Chrysler Town & Country since they share the same parts for this mechanism. Some people on the Internet say that the problem went away after they had the dealer flash the BCM (Body Control Module). Other people had to get an entirely new BCM before the problem disappeared. We never went down either of those paths since I had a simple quick, although temporary, fix. If you open up the fuse panel under the hood next to the battery:
Then remove, count to 5 and then replace the following fuse:
The doors should work again for a while.
With the first van that had this problem, we went for many months just pulling and replacing the fuse whenever a problem occurred, and it would usually only stop working every few weeks. A while later we ended up replacing the battery after the van wouldn't start one morning. Since the door issue was only an occasional problem, I never really realized that it never happened after we got the new battery.
Fast forward a few years, and we ended up having to replace the van, and we opted for the same exact model & year. When we had the "new" used van for a couple of weeks, the left power sliding door stopped working one day. We were on a trip so I did the quick-fix fuse pull & replace, and the door started working again. Within a week, the van wouldn't start one day. A jump start got us working again, but I took the van to Auto Zone to have the battery checked, and it failed the load test. I replaced the battery on this van, and we haven't seen the doors stop working again!
My guess is that the Body Control Module (BCM) that gets so much attention has a failure mode that is supposed to disable the sliding door motor if it detects a short or a stuck electric motor, but that when the van's battery starts getting marginal, it trips into this mode unnecessarily.
