17978 Engine start blocked by imobiliser

[ericd]

17978 Engine start blocked by imobiliser

Recently started getting this (with the ongoing Hall sender problem, just waiting on a few bits), anyway just wondered if this was indicitive of dropping voltage, as the engine just managed to start on the last turn , just as the battery sounded like it was giving up .

Anybody did any work with vagcom and errors reported with a failing battery etc ,

[S2central.net]

Let me hit the books on that one... Dunno how fussy the immo is about a weak battery - maybe the signal from the key transponder is first to wobble and then the immo complains ?

[ericd]

Cheers Paul, guessing it might just be a bit of a crap shoot , depending on how good the parse tree stuff is in there...

[Jas11n]

As it happens yes Eric. Mine went through it's MOT week before Christmas.
I'd noticed my battery struggling to turn the engine over more and more, especially after a cold frosty night. During the MOT you know how it's goes, they have the ignition on, switching lights on and off, indies on, brake lights, wipers, horn etc etc etc. Mine started to do all sort of weird stuff, wipers after while refused to work, horn wouldn't work, my HID's failed the come on etc etc. They'd nearly killed the battery dead. Car really struggled to start.
Had to buy a new Bosch silver battery there and then (78 quid ). The car failed on emmisions (that's another story due to crap chips) but while pulling codes to see if Lambda was the cause of the fail, that above code was stored. I'd vag-com'd the car the day before the test and all was clear.
First time I'd seen it, cleared it and it's not been back. Myself and my local specialist put it down the the killed battery.....I hope.

Jas..

[ericd]

Cheers Jas,
just did a bit more investigation out in the snow & wind , cleared the 17978 error, looked in 'immobilser' section and got

01776 - key
07-10 - Signal To Low - Intermittent

Genuine spelling mistake as well , I'm using 303.1, cleared the error in Immo.

Now logging good old 515 (G40) , well I guess I answered my own question, in some circumstances dropping voltage/low battery can generate an error 01776 which results in 17978 , passed an hour I guess

BTW

Bought myself one of those CTEK 3600 battery charger/conditioner that Fatty's got, so should be able to keep it going till I fix G40 problem