Warranty problem

[jned2]

My sons girlfriend has been in hospital for a month, on returning home yesterday her car wouldn't start, it's a '66 plate Citroen Cactus. A local garage came round, thought it was a flat battery, they tried to jump start it, no joy. It was bought from a Citroen dealership but with a non Citroen warranty. The RAC took the car to the dealership, after also failing to start it. The dealership said they couldn't look at the car for at least 3 weeks but later that afternoon phoned her to say they had done a diagnotic test and that the ECU was the problem and she was looking at a bill of around £2,000. My son asked for a copy of the diagnostic report which they emailed him, it states:

Possible cause: Electrical Over-Stress, Following a battery drain, wrong usage of start up booster.
Remarks. Carry out a fault reading. The detection of P1631 may induce a ECU reset. The faults P0003,P2265,P0245 may be memorised.

Does this make sense to anyone? Is it possible that the dealership are trying to get out of fixing the problem under warranty? Can jump starting a car using battery leads correctlycause such damage?

Many thanks.

[HiAsAKite]

Have they actually tried replacing the battery? (and depending on the car - it may need "coding" to the car to work properly)

A flat (or nearly flat battery) will cause all manner of problems with modern cars, and it is likely that it went flat whilst it was unused.

[WPA]

Jump starting it could have caused a spike that fried the ECU

[E-bmw]

WPA said:

Jump starting it could have caused a spike that fried the ECU

^^^ Wot 'e said.

Entirely possible, many cars do not like it or need it to be done in a very specific way to avoid such issues, these instructions are generally in the manual.

[OutInTheShed]

First thing to do is RTFM.

ECU problems, generally you need make-specific, model specific info.
Unfortunately it's not the kind of car where enthusiasts have learned lots of useful things about the ECU and good advice may be scarce.

There is a great dela of duff info on the interweb, not all ECUs are the same, not all software releases in the same ECU in the same model of car behave the same. Some outwardly similar models of car don't even have the same ECU, certain french marques have been known to swap around seemingly at random.


It's quite likely that a competent person with a code-reader/reset tool could fit a new battery and sort it out.
I don't believe it's that easy to cause 'hardware damage' by jumpstarting.

Some cars, you must not jump start direct to the battery, you must use the correct connection point under the bonnet.

If it has been killed by the local garage, does the insurance cover that?
Does that fact that the car curled its toes up after a short while parked up constitute a wattanty claim? Personally 7 year old car needs battery seems like normal life.

I would be talking indy citroen specialists and asking if they could recommend an ECU/diagnostics/coding person.

[drdino]

PSA cars are a bit sensitive to undervoltage/improper shutdown and the BSI is prone to corruption under such conditions; it's not the jump starting that's the issue as modern ECUs tend to be robust to reverse polarity for a limited amount of time. Do you have access to the car? You can try the beep test if so.