Technical Warning light - what does it all mean?

[mmarks]

I put a new battery in my 2001 Maerea 1.6 Weekend on Tuesday and used it for the first time to do a 75 mile commute.
Towards the end of the commute, a warning light appeared on the dashboard - looks like a sideways shot of an engine with a lid on it. Car still seemed to run fine and as I checked the instruments, I noticed the temperature guage was nearly on cold, it had been between a thrid and halfway for the previous part of the journey.
Stopped the car and restarted to see if that reset anything. Car started fine (and seemed fine for the rest of thr journey), but the warning light was still on. Any ideas what this light means and what I need to do???

thanks,

Mike

 

[Venters]

A trip to the dealer if you want to know why the engine management light is on I'm afraid. They will need to hook it up to the examiner and read the codes to find out why it is on.

 

[bpetersb]

The engine management light often comes on when there is some sort of glitch that affects the ecu. Find somewhere with a diagnostic tool and get them to just reset the light the first time but make a note of any fault code. If it happens again with the same code then you may wish to do something about it depending on what the code means and how soon it recurrs.
We often get customers in the garage I manage who have been driving around for ages with the light on without any problems.
At the end of the day the ecu is computer and suffers the odd hang up or glitch in much the same way as your home computer might do.