A friend of mine got a flat battery in the middle of nowhere a few nights ago and due to the lack of mobile phone reception, she had a few friends attempt jumpstarting the car.
The car is a 2000 or 1999 Nissan Pulsar (I think) so therefore has a computer. The jumpstart that they gave the car was not quite to the rulebook (I think they burnt the rulebook and threw it into a river personally) and they had the jumper leads around the wrongway at first and second time around jumpstarted.
The car seems to be fine except for the central locking, boot and panic button which now no longer work. My question is: What possibly fried? If I were to wager a guess, would it be the radio reciever for the remote?
…Secondly, would this be covered by warranty at all? Can the computer diagnostics pick up that a surge was present in the car?
“ummm…It was like that when I came out this morning”
On a related topic, isn’t there a possibly way to get the diagnostics off the computer? (10 key turns to ON in the ignition in quick succession?)
Read the warranty, but almost certainly NOT covered.
And if you COULD get rid of the “diagnostics”, MAYBE they could fix the problem quick, but sooner or later there’ll she’ll either have to pay to repair IT, or pay more for other repairs cause they take longer to fix. Or, if you figure out a way just want to dump it’s recent “event” memory, they’ll spend all kinds of time trying to figure out how THAT happened.
Just tell her to bring it in, and show her how to jumpstart the car.
Sounds to me like it might be purely coincidence that those things went out. Generally, when you hook up jumper cables backwards and try to jump start a car the battery blows or you short out the entire electrical system. You might be able to buy a diagnostic computer for around $100 or so at an auto parts store which will tell you exactly what’s wrong. It might also be a side-effect of the dead battery causing the problems. Many of the cars today don’t respond very well to repairs made outside of the dealership because the computer hasn’t been “told” that a repair’s been made, so the car doesn’t “know” that its been fixed. One way to correct this is to disconnect the battery from the car for a period of time (something like 10 minutes) and then reconnect it. That wipes the memory from the computer and it has to “relearn” everything again the next time you start it up (so be prepared for it to run strangely at first). In any case, you should have the dealership look at it, because other problems might crop up later on and electrical problems are notoriously difficult to track down. (Whether or not your friend tells them what happened is entirely up to her.)