I love turning the battery off! Has that trick ever solved your problem?

Maybe you can confirm this for me but I have been told that you cannot reset the ECUs by just turning off the battery. You have to actually unplug them.

Dave
Indy
348ss

 

It is strange a friend of mine had a suspension warning light on his 360 and the dealer asked him to turn off and on the battery switch to see if it gets cleared. No it didn't.
In the old days when I worked on engine controllers there were different types of memory used to store data. And, if you disconnected the battery, let's say for 24 hours the internal charges to ecu would diminish to the point that the info written to memory would be lost. In the modern days the ecus are equipped with non-volatile memory or flash which means the error codes are written to a place where disconnecting the battery should not matter. Only under certain conditions the information can be erased or written, and that actually requires voltage to the ecu.

 

It was once required that errors and check engine lights be in hard memory. As of 99 it is no longer required. Much adaptive memory will be lost, so will readiness codes. If you go for a Ca smog test before the readiness codes are reestablished you will fail for that reason alone. Bosch is notorious for not telling us how to reestablish readiness codes and has not shared that info for any system built after Motronic 2.7 (348, 512, F50). Some times it takes a combination of things that will take many starts, warmups, drives, etc.

 

I forgot to say that on more recent Ferraris that most warning lights except CEL will not turn off by cycling the batt. I strongly suggest not turning off the batt. If required to "reboot" in an effort to get home is one thing, but if there is a problem to be diagnosed it will make it more difficult. Some of the errors tell us, how many times, when, and under what circumstances an error happened. Often important info in the process of diagnosis. Also with all of the adaptive systems on the car you are forcing it to relearn every time instead of adding to a long term database.

 

I have not done it on my Ferrari, but I have used the disconnect the battery for 15-20min tech on my BMWs and Range Rover MKIII with great success.

In fact it is the first thing I do whenever something electrical is doing something 'odd', or something with electric override.

It works, and when it does not, to the dealership it goes.

 

It fixed the seatbelt mechanism on my TR a hundred times. Btw, the new seatbelts that were just put in by Ferrari under the recall STILL don't work properly. Anyone?

 

It's a good way to deal with those pieces of crap. Ferrari has had several "fixes" for them, to date none have worked.

 

I tried it with a 360 Modena. (see an old thread in Modern : Can you start this 360?) It didn’t work. In the end (yesterday) the dealer took out the aftermarket ECUs and put the origional one back in. The car now works, albeit with stock horse power.