My grandfather’s got an interesting situation with his '02 Impala.
The security light on the dash comes on and goes of intermittently but the vehicle never experiences a “no start” condition consistent with the Passlock system getting tripped.
From time to time the trunk’s remote open feature activates spontaneously.
I’ve googled “Chevy Impala” and “security light” and “trunk opens” to no avail.
It appears all kinds of people have trouble with their car going into anti-theft mode, but no one has reported this set of symptoms.
Any clues?
I have an '05 Impala, and while I’ve never had the remote open the trunk spontaneously, it has opened (enough for it to ding at me and say “Trunk Open”, but the trunk does not actually fly open) when going over large bumps. There is a pothole in my workplace’s parking lot which is a particular offender. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does happen, it’s a pain in the butt.
Does the security light come on when the car is running? I have seen it come on intermittently when the car is not running–when you first get in, for instance. I always thought that was normal.
I had an 2001 Saturn L300, not too dissimilar from the Impala, with the intermittent spontaneous trunk opening problem. It took 3 trips to the dealership for them to fix it, and that was after a bulletin came out about it. IIRC, they had to reload the car’s computer with a patch or something - they weren’t too clear on that. It did correct the problem, though.
Regarding the security issue, my Saturn had a somewhat similar issue in that occasionally the remote would not unlock the doors until I had unlocked them with the key and started the car. During these incidents, it would not set off the alarm as it should have and the remote functioned normally afterwards. I never got that one fixed, so I don’t know what caused it.