Last night on leaving work, my battery collapsed. Twisted the key, one tiny cranking noise, then everything went wild. Gauges swung back and forth, and doors locked and unlocked. I thought it might have been an EMP from an experiment my electronic engineer colleagues were conducting nearby. However, they fetched a multimeter and tested the battery. With no load, it read 12V, but as soon as I turned on the ignition, the voltage fell to ~3V, and everything went wild again. They speculated that an internal bus bar had broken.

Anyway, I called the RACQ and had a new battery fitted (too late to go to a battery store nearby). That fixed the problem, BUT the DSC was playing up. Both the DSC light and the skidding car symbol were on, and clicking the switch did nothing. The RACQ guy said he seen a similar thing with Subaru Imprezas, and if I was lucky, things would return to normal after another start. Actually it took two starts to properly initialize the DSC thingy, but it seems fine now.

 

Anytime the battery is disconnected, you will have to reset the DCS/TCS..............simply turn the key to "on" not start, then turn the wheel all the way one direction, then all the way the other direction, turn the key off................then you can start as normal and no TCS/DCS light.

 

yea i had to reset mine too after i unplugged my battery to install the DICE unit. the book says to turn it all the way to the left then all the way to the right, turn off the car and then turn it back on.

When you get back into your car the light might already be off. Not sure if it would be worth unplugging the battery again and resetting it the proper way

 

labrat,

As said above for DSC reset. If DSC warning light is off, it is recalibrated, no need to redo it.

Also you will find the windows are not automatically go up and down as well. Do full up and down the windows twice, that will solve the problem.

 

Or maybe the car is possessed by an escapee from one of his lab experiments?

Seriously, these things are good to know...

 

I wish I could utter those immortal words "come into the lab, check what's on the slab", but what I do is so boring that only a geek like me could find interest in it.

As it was, I was about to accuse my electronic engineer colleagues of nuking my ECU with an electro-magnetic pulse from some RF experiments they were doing. They were kind enough to see through my mounting panic and get a multi-meter to check my battery. The hypothesis for the wild swinging of gauges, etc., is that the car's computer does draw a bit of power, and was constantly going through an initializing process each time the battery was able to give it a little bit of current. It was kind of scary to see.

 

The inconvenience of a battery failure is such that I now change a cars battery every three years, regardless.

Much better to wear a little extra cost now to prevent the heartache later.

 

A man of foresight and planning. I have enough trouble remembering what I had for lunch, let alone when I last installed a battery.