Hi It has been two months since i drove my car. When i tried starting it today, the battery was dead. I got the jump leads out and used the power from another car to get mine started. However, when i drove it, and whenver i took my foot of the gas, it just kept cutting out. I drove it for over half an hr, yet still the car kept cutting out whenevr i took my foot of the gas. Any ideas why this is, and how best to solve the problem? Thanks
if the battery has been completely flat then the computer (if applicable) will have forgotten it's settings for the running. You may need to drive the car in a certain way for a while. Usually a half hour drive in various conditions will do it. Knowing the car type might help.
mrcheerful
Same thing happened to my car (Petrol 1.4 Fiesta 2004) when I completely flattened the battery. The ECU lost all it's settings and so would immediately cut out when I didn't have more than 1,500 revs. RAC bloke told me to drive it around the block a couple of times doing various speeds and gears, which wasn't easy while keeping the engine from stalling! About 10 minutes of that and it was ok.
I would have thought if the ecu lost its memory the default settings would rev a bit too high until the ecu had re-learned. Unless the ecu was working harder to mask a problem.
Oddly enough, not always! An XR2i I worked on definitely doesn't tick over after a battery change, I was not happy about HAVING to drive it round for half an hour just because I had to renew the battery, I learnt my lesson though and always maintain the memories now, much less hassle.
mrcheerful
You would think so wouldn't you?! But no :-\
Now that you have identified the car I can tell you straight away that you'll need to visit the dealer to have the ECU re-aligned with the throttle body. They'll probably charge you for cleaning it also, which is recommended.
About 50quid.
This is par for the course with some VAG cars now, especially 1.4 and 1.6's with the ETM.
Tim..
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