What's happened to my 2003 Fiesta?

Battery flat would be the first thing, after that bad connections on battery leads.

Spot on. AA man replaced battery as the old was wouldn't take charge. Too old I guess, and it chose today to pack in. I'm relieved it was relatively trivial.

Thanks.

That's what happened when I called the AA for a Homestart because I had an appointment, and couldn't wait to trickle-charge it. I wondered later whether they always pick up a new battery en route to a Homestart job, on a sale or return basis, and add a few quid on. ;-)

I called the missus and asked her to ring them. We work at the same place, and I'd left it in the works car park. She'd tried her own key (I thought maybe mine wouldn't work with the immobiliser, or something), got the same result, called the AA, and kept it simple, telling them that it wouldn't turn over. I expect that's why they turned up with a battery just 15 minutes later. I realised while I was elsewhere that that was probably the most important symptom. All the other weird stuff was just incidental. There were strange patterns on the dash, things buzzing and clicking for a few seconds. I was due to pick up our lad from school, so I just got out, called the school, and started walking rather quickly :-) Battery was only £76. I'm content with that.

A high percentage of cars use virtually identical batteries, and patrols often carry a few. They don't add anything on to the price, but do get a commission on sales.

If they don't have a battery on board, they will usually jump-start the car, then follow you to somewhere that will supply one for them to fit.

Chris

I had occasion to ring in for a jump start once, the RAC duly turned up and said the battery was knackered (which O agree it was) They wanted to get me a new battery on the spot, but I insisted on a jump start, they were reluctant to leave it at that and said that if I stalled it on the way home they would charge to come out again. Many people would probably be intimidated by that and agree. I drove it home without incident and got the battery replaced under its guarantee.

Fair enough. He did a test of the old battery via his laptop, and I thought £65 was reasonable, to have the battery brought and fitted.

Mrcheerful put finger to keyboard:

That's a reasonable approach by the RAC. I'm sure had you stalled on the way home, your car would have simultaneously and purely coincidentally suffered some other mishap :-)

ISTR the RAC being significantly higher priced for a new battery than the motor factors - something like twice as much. This was a decade or so ago, they may have got more realistic these days, especially as smartphones give people the means to look at prices while they wait for the breakdown man to turn up!

When cell phones were new on the scene (early 80's) I was travelling with a friend in some old wreck of a van (his) oming along the embankment, the van died from lack of spark, caused by a broken set of points, my friend had a GBFO Motorola hand set and phoned a car shop in Romford that stayed open till late (it was about 9pm) to get out a set of points and get a taxi to deliver them to us, all went well and within an hour we were on the way home.

I was stranded with a hire car. Oh yes, I didn't know that something was still on while the key was out, so it drained the battery overnight.

Called the hire car company, the man arrived, I was surprised that he didn't bring any cable or anything. So what did he do?

He removed the battery from his service car, got hold of spanner tools from the cars toolset, used these as electrical connectors while balancing his battery over the hire car battery. Then asked me to start the engine. Never seen anything like it, LOL. But it worked.