Immobiliser (?) issue

I went out for a short drive in my 550 this afternoon. My car started immediately, despite not having been driven for around 3 weeks - battery good and strong. After about five minutes, I stopped. When I came to start it again, less than a minute later, it was dead.

The RAC mechanic came along and tried all the obvious things, but to no avail. The battery was fine and he tested the fobs which were both working OK, but just not doing anything. The doors would not lock either and the little red light on the dashboard stayed off all the time.

Harvey, Carrs' (my local Ferrari agent) chief technician, dropped by to take a look (he was collecting a car from a customer nearby), but he couldn't get it to work either. As we were waiting for the tow truck to arrive, Harvey pressed the fob again (for the hundredth time this afternoon!) and there was a loud click as the doors locked. He put the key in the ignition, turned it, and the engine started!

Coincidentally, they have had a 456 in recently with the same problem: it wouldn't start for no obvious reason, but, equally mysteriously, an hour later it started just like normal.

I have left the car with Carrs for them to check it over, but it is always difficult to find the cause when a fault fixes itself. So I wondered whether any one else has had a similar problem, either with a 550 or a 456?

 

Carry your spare key-fob with you. If it happens again you can at least then discount whether it is a fault with just one fob, or not. This type of fault happened to me on another car (A Chrysler), leaving the dashboard dead. The AA man tapped around the dashboard with the flat of his hand.....and magic.....all systems go. According to the AA, a common fault...most likely a dry joint on a printed circuit or similar. It keeps happening, but at least I know how to fix it. Finding which one of the joints in the circuit is the original nightmare scenario......and I suspect one day it will leave me stranded for good. See if your friendly technician can at least isolate the potential problem down to one specific circuit, or ECU ?.......it could take a while.! I'm sure the rest of us would appreciate some feed-back for future reference.

 

First, in answer to the last post, I do routinely carry my spare fob (I keep it in the car, so that if my first fob fails, I can open the car with the key and then use the spare fob to switch off the alarm) and that produced the same result. Also, the RAC man had a fob testing device and both fobs passed as working.

Now the solution. I picked the car up today. Carrs found a bad joint on the fuse panel which they tell me is a result of the ageing process affecting the fuse panel itself. That is now fixed, so I should not get that problem again. However, continued ageing is likely to result in further problems in the area of the fuse panel. As replacement fuse panels are no longer available, there is no way of preventing this and the best we can do is to add an inspection of the fuse panel to the annual service schedule to try to identify issues before they become problems. Not perfect, but the best under the circumstances.

 

Nope the answer is to rewire the fuse box. Search it I did the spaghetti method and it has worked better than oem ferrari for years. There is a company who also does this rewire and SRI in colorado either rewires the whole thing, wires partial, and gets big loads off the main boards.

 

That's very like an issue with your key fob that is cloned.

https://youtu.be/a8vGE_k8BKk?t=303

 

Nope.

 

Sorry Taz it's just that I read this and thought about how cloned fobs cause this kind of issue.

 

No, in this case it was definitely down to a dodgy connection in the fuse panel. Sorry if I have caused any confusion.