Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Troubleshooting Don't use your Contour to jumpstart another car...

Anyone know what's up with this?

I used my SVT Contour to jumpstart my other car because the battery was dead. That worked fine (following instructions in the Contour manual).

Now the highbeam indicator light on the dash stays on all the time, unless I turn on the parking lights or headlights.

Also, I killed my DRLs (Canadian car). They don't work at all.

Wonder what other damage could have been done...

Anyone else experience weird stuff like this after jump starting another car?

I pulled the battery connections, waited 10 mins and reconnected to reset the computer...no luck. DRLs still dead. Will check the fuses/relays next.

Kerry

I had problems like that when a friend of mine hooked the cables up backwards on my first car to jump his. May be only fuses....In my case it fried the electrical system. I hated that friend... a couple years later he screwed up my plugs trying to help me change them. Had to go out and buy new wires and plugs.

I've helped my sister's few times... she was always forgeting the lights on...

You know... females..

And I never had any problems....

I've jump started one of my other cars and expect to do so again this weekend, with no problems.

I haven't read jump start method in manual but presume you had the SVT engine on and that the last cable connection was to a ground away from battery. I presume also that you got other car started.

Sounds like your DRL relay (which has solid state internals) may have suffered a voltage spike and crapped out. There are also a couple of diodes in DRL circuit that might be sacrificed if you had reversed polarity.
But it could also just be coincidental.

p.s. PCM not involved in controllig DRLs.
p.p.s. I could give you more specific troubleshooting suggestions in later post, but you would require multimeter.

Many people make the mistake of connecting the negative terminal to the battery post instead of a seperate grounding point.

I'm spoiled since the zetec has two hoist points on either side of the valve cover that also double as grounding points.

I have been told by various Master Mechanics at carious times that newer cars that have the computer running right off the battery post (we have the conencting plate, but pretty much same thing) should not try to jump other cars. It can screw with your computer due to various reasons. I'm guessing something along the lines of unhealthy voltage fluctuations.

I tried to jump my buddies Lincoln Mark VIII and it caused my car to get all frazzled with little tufts of smoke here and there. I quickly stopped helping :-) (Could be because he may have needed more juice to supply his V8 setup. Don't know, but I didn't like it...)

An old EE professor of mine one had a sign that said something like this:

We all know that electronics work on smoke. How do we know this? Because when the smoke is released, the electronics stop working.

Bad positive to good positive, good negative to ground (away from the bad battery), in that order. Reverse for removal.

Another reason to phone CAA/AAA!

Ouch