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Technical A dashboard like Blackpool Illuminations

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Technical A dashboard like Blackpool Illuminations

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Alanw47

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I have just returned from a 2,300 trip around France and on the way back I experienced the dashboard from Hell. I had warning lights for, Electronic Steering Lock, Electronic Hand Brake, Hill Start Assist, Stop and Start, Mode Selector and the chilling "check engine" and the auto transmission gear selector locked and wouldn't change position.

After about 5 minutes of panicking, the engine finally restarted and MOST of the warnings faded away except Stop/Start, Mode Selector and Check Engine that stubbornly refused to desist.

I drove gingerly to my hotel, kicked the tyres a couple of times and retired to my room to find my European Breakdown cover.

The next morning the car fired up first time with no warnings at all.

It occurred to me that prior to the warnings fest I had been driving through an outside temperature of 32-33 degrees at 130 kph for about 3 hours and it must have got mighty hot under the bonnet. I stopped for diesel and that's where it all went wrong.

Back home now, still no warnings, but Monday I shall be visiting the dealer to get it checked over.

On the bright side 2,300 miles of spirited driving at speeds up to 130 kph yielded an average consumption of 45mpg, not too bad.
 
Alanw47 said:
I have just returned from a 2,300 trip around France and on the way back I experienced the dashboard from Hell. I had warning lights for, Electronic Steering Lock, Electronic Hand Brake, Hill Start Assist, Stop and Start, Mode Selector and the chilling "check engine" and the auto transmission gear selector locked and wouldn't change position.

After about 5 minutes of panicking, the engine finally restarted and MOST of the warnings faded away except Stop/Start, Mode Selector and Check Engine that stubbornly refused to desist.

I drove gingerly to my hotel, kicked the tyres a couple of times and retired to my room to find my European Breakdown cover.

The next morning the car fired up first time with no warnings at all.

It occurred to me that prior to the warnings fest I had been driving through an outside temperature of 32-33 degrees at 130 kph for about 3 hours and it must have got mighty hot under the bonnet. I stopped for diesel and that's where it all went wrong.

Back home now, still no warnings, but Monday I shall be visiting the dealer to get it checked over.

On the bright side 2,300 miles of spirited driving at speeds up to 130 kph yielded an average consumption of 45mpg, not too bad.
Click to expand...

I had something similar - lots of unconnected errors and lights being logged.
Turned out that the battery connection was loose- according to the recovery guy, he's seen a lot of this on French cars.
Maybe yours was coming out in sympathy.
Might be worth just making sure the connections are good - I seem to remember one of them is a push on and just needed pushing down.
 
I had the same fault on mine coming and going over a few days then the car refused to start... flat battery. Battery had failed with a dead cell.Replaced under warranty at 13 months old!
 
varesecrazy said:
electrical load was a thought..

but obviously it wasn't a COLD start..

maybe aircon ,etc was quite a drain.
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With an outside temp of 32 or so, and the air con set at 16 I think (I do like it cold)it's quite likely that the unit was working overtime, hopefully the dealer will give me a few clues next week.
 
twobigdogs said:
I had the same fault on mine coming and going over a few days then the car refused to start... flat battery. Battery had failed with a dead cell.Replaced under warranty at 13 months old!
Click to expand...



My uConnect Live app is constantly showing the battery as 80% so that may well have been a factor, but the air con unit was in great demand, so the combination may have been enough to provoke a surrender
 
Alanw47;
Did your dealer shed any light on this?
Got a 'random' Stop & Start amber light yesterday. Also showed up in the warning section on instrument panel.
Got home, checked manual, which indicates contact dealer. I can already hear the response; 'couldn't find anything....'
Restarted car, both warnings had cleared, of course.
Heading to South France in a few weeks so don't want any issues
 
luigibishopton said:
Alanw47;
Did your dealer shed any light on this?
Got a 'random' Stop & Start amber light yesterday. Also showed up in the warning section on instrument panel.
Got home, checked manual, which indicates contact dealer. I can already hear the response; 'couldn't find anything....'
Restarted car, both warnings had cleared, of course.
Heading to South France in a few weeks so don't want any issues
Click to expand...



Dealer can't even look at the car for another week as I didn't want to leave it there and be carless. However I have had no further warnings or strange behaviours so I'm tending to think that it was possibly an electrical glitch caused by overheating of the CPU, it had been treated harshly that day.

When I find out their final evaluation I will post it here. Fingers crossed
 
luigibishopton said:
Alanw47;
Did your dealer shed any light on this?
Got a 'random' Stop & Start amber light yesterday. Also showed up in the warning section on instrument panel.
Got home, checked manual, which indicates contact dealer. I can already hear the response; 'couldn't find anything....'
Restarted car, both warnings had cleared, of course.
Heading to South France in a few weeks so don't want any issues
Click to expand...



Good news, sort of.

Garage have Road Tested car, no faults found. Hooked it up to their computer, no faults found and nothing logged on ECU. Strangely they asked "Did it happen in a petrol station?" It did.

Presumably they are aware of an issue that they are not expanding upon.

They also feel the high outside temperature may have contributed to it, so all good really, just a Glitch
 
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Mine's currently at the dealer having a new ECU. Had a keyless warning light come on last week. nothing actually wrong as far as I could tell, but was passing the dealer and manual said to contact them, so I did. They did a quick check and asked me to bring it in the next day, so I did (light had gone away) They called me an hour after dropping it off and said it needed a new ecu and it would take about a week. They dropped me off a loan car and I've not seen it since.
 
Last edited:
robotdancer said:
Mine's currently at the dealer having a new ECU. Had a keyless warning light come on last week. nothing actually wrong as far as I could tell, but was passing the dealer and manual said to contact them, so I did. They did a quick check and asked me to bring it in the next day, so I did (light had gone away) They called me an hour after dropping it off and said it needed a new ecu and it would take about a week. They dropped me off a loan car and I've not seen it since.
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I hope it's a warranty repair. God knows how much an ECU costs
 
I'm not going to pre judge, pre-empt, etc. any "mechanic says" or "dealer says" xyz.

Generally speaking when the dash board lights up like a Christmas tree, multiple faults are thrown etc. then one has to question why everything that was OK yesterday is not OK today.

In 90%+ of these types of issues then it is either battery, wiring (ground and 12V integrity) issues that cause the "I'm never wrong" computer and diagnostic equipment to pin the blame on something other than what is really wrong/broken.

In simply human speak then everything in life requires a stable known reference point. Your moral values, a ground reference point etc. If the reference point is disturbed, unreliable etc. then everything else is no longer valid.

And here in lies a problem with some so called diagnostic experts. They paid £5000 pounds for a machine and trust it implicitly. Mistake number 1!
 
The car was fine except for the one warning that cleared itself. They're paying so I'm not bothered. I did tell them to check the battery separately. I spent nearly a decade with some 'quality' German manufacturers and distributors and a plethora of random electrical faults boiled down to a dicky battery. Modern cars rely so heavily on these heavy duty batteries and even if they're slightly off, you get lots of ghost issues. I'll let you know when it comes back.
 
s130 said:
I'm not going to pre judge, pre-empt, etc. any "mechanic says" or "dealer says" xyz.

Generally speaking when the dash board lights up like a Christmas tree, multiple faults are thrown etc. then one has to question why everything that was OK yesterday is not OK today.

In 90%+ of these types of issues then it is either battery, wiring (ground and 12V integrity) issues that cause the "I'm never wrong" computer and diagnostic equipment to pin the blame on something other than what is really wrong/broken.

In simply human speak then everything in life requires a stable known reference point. Your moral values, a ground reference point etc. If the reference point is disturbed, unreliable etc. then everything else is no longer valid.

And here in lies a problem with some so called diagnostic experts. They paid £5000 pounds for a machine and trust it implicitly. Mistake number 1!
Click to expand...



I don't want to prejudge it either. When I first took possession of the car it clearly had a fault but the computer kept saying that it didn't. After many thousands (of Fiat's) pounds the fault was traced to a faulty sensor. The computer didn't show it up as a fault because it was still communicating with the ECU. Unfortunately it was transmitting the wrong information.

I am inclined to believe them however because everything cleared itself over a period of hours ad the car cooled down, and there have been no alerts since. Features that clearly showed up a warning are obviously working (and always were I believe, such as handbrake, hill start assist). Consumption and performance are all normal and all the electronics seem to be functioning normally.

In view of the dealer's comments I'm inclined to believe that it was either a known issue with petrol stations or the 'heat soak' effect after a very fast run in 32 degree external temperatures

I shall keep you posted if anything else lights up, but I'm bemused as to why the ECU didn't record it.
 
The good news is that I got my car back with no faults logged on the ECU and everything 'Green' in the visual Health Check. That should do until next Service in December.

As a point of interest my car had its second birthday at the end of May and the Health Check shows front brake pads only 40% worn. Not too shabby for an automatic.
 
Well it's been about 2 months since the dashboard illuminations and there has been absolutely no repeat of anything. No faults were recorded on the ECU at all.

I can only assume that it was down to one of two scenarios

a). The perfect storm of hot weather, heavy aircon use and fast motorway driving caused the ECU to overheat and everything returned to normal as the car cooled down at journey's end

b). Some electronic interference at the petrol station, although quite why it took a few hours to go back to 'normal' I can't explain.

Hey ho, the mysteries of Fiat
 
robotdancer said:
Mine's currently at the dealer having a new ECU. Had a keyless warning light come on last week. nothing actually wrong as far as I could tell, but was passing the dealer and manual said to contact them, so I did. They did a quick check and asked me to bring it in the next day, so I did (light had gone away) They called me an hour after dropping it off and said it needed a new ecu and it would take about a week. They dropped me off a loan car and I've not seen it since.
Click to expand...

How are you getting along with your issue?
 
varesecrazy said:
How are you getting along with your issue?
Click to expand...
Well it was never really an issue, keyless warning light came on once and disappeared at next start up. But as I was driving past the dealer I popped in. They were the ones who thought that there was an issue.

ECU swapped under warranty, no probs since, just done it's 20k service and all is well.

So it's running fine, but then it always has.

The dealership thought there was some water ingress in the ECU casing which is why they swapped it.
 
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