I have a Fiat Stilo Abarth with many faults. It can start and go into 1st and 2nd gear with the foot on the brake but when you put your foot off the car goes into Neutral within 5 ish seconds but when its driving on the roads it wont go any higher than 2nd gear. Also the car comes up with many faults like ASR, ESP, ABS and Engine faults but with only one code an electrical fault in the system for all of the faults. Its doing my head in. Any suggestions on how to solve this bizarre problem. Its head battering for me and my car :bang:. Many thanks

I take it you have a selespeed then?


Re the electrical faults, have you checked to see if your battery is healthy?

Yes i do have a Selespeed and the battery is not healthy because it has been sitting on my drive since we got a more reliable car and take the stilo out on a weekly basis until now this has happened

The Abarth requires a good battery of the the correct type. Then it will be reliable.

Thanks ill spend some money on a new battery

While doing that make sure the battery clamps are clean and in good condition too.

Agreed the systems on the stilo are very sensitive to a weak battery, they will throw all sorts of weird and wonderful lights codes and error messages if the battery is poor.

Thank you everyone for the suggestions and hopefully i will have my beautiful car running again

I had my UK Abarth stored for a year in Greece as I was back for a while with the Battery removed, but still it was an old battery and I didn't constantly placed it under charge.
Battery was charged but the car felt like creating short-circuits and all the relays started playing around. The fan was starting whilst the car was parked etc, so I've concluded that I had a short circuit. After cleaning the fuse/relay box and all the connections (took me 2-3 hours to remove the cables), the car didn't start at all.

3 months later, I charged the battery with a very strong charger, car was back to life (managed to start), but it was unreliable.
Threw the old battery and bought a very strong Bosch S5 72Ah, the car never had a single electric or electronic problem ever since.

Drove Athens(Greece) - York (UK) back and forth, no problem at all. Car was left for several days on parking lots (like in Stansted), no problem starting afterwards in 0 degrees.

It's a very sensitive car on battery.