Just wanted to let everyone know about this interesting qwirk I came across last month. Had the new Monte in the garage since there was a bunch of ice & snow on the roads. It was pretty cold, but the garage stays above freezing. After letting it sit for about a couple weeks the battery was completely dead. I found that when the battery's dead, the key can't be taken out of the ignition. As soon as the batter got some juice the key came out no problem. Anyone had this happen on any other models?

 

I haven't had any problems with my car, but it's a daily driver so I rarely would not use it for more than a day or two. There is another guy here who has one, and his battery died after about the same amount of time. Probably something to do with all the new electronic gadgetsthat take electricity to store memory. If you store that long for often you're best bet is to buy something like a Battery Tender. They will automatically maintain a battery's charge, without you ever touching it. Just plug it in, and the tender autmatically monitors the condition of the battery, if it needs juice it automatically starts charging. One of these should extend the life of your battery as well. As far as the key being locked in, it probably has something to do with the chip in the key itself. The carhas to work with a specific key, so your average Joe can't copy your key at a keysmith and steal your car. You actually have to program the car to work with a certain key, and if you need to program an additional key, you need one of the originals there at the same time to do it. Perhaps the car locks the key so that if it should happen to lose the memory that tells it what keys to allow (due to the dead battery) then it can automatically re-learn the key.

That's my best guess anyways.

 

why would you leave your keys in the car, in the ignition?? I know it's in a garage and all, but even with mine in the garage at my house, I park it, lock it, and put the keys inside the house somewhere. If someone breaks into my garage (which sets the alarms off anyway), I'm not going to make it easy for them to just get in, turn the key and take off with my car. LOL

anyway, yes - if there's no power the key will be stuck in the ignition - it's happened to me as well - some sort of locking mechanism. If you're going to let the car sit for weeks at a time, I would recommend disconnecting the negative battery cable to save the battery.

Back when mine was only 7 months old, my battery totally died - and this is a daily driver! Once it was jump started, it ran fine, but as soon as you turned it off and then even tried to start it right back up, nothing. Took it to my dealer and it ended up being 2 bad cells in the battery. So, they gave me a nice, new AC Delco Professional Series battery, which has even more juice than the ones that come in our cars - it's around 740 CCA I believe, whereas our originals are only 650 I think.

anyway, since they replaced the battery, I've had zero problems.

 

Hey, 06monteSS, thanks for your input. I attempted to send you an email through the forum a while ago, you didn't happen to get it, did you?

 

Yeah, this just happened to MCF member rj, as well. His battery died after a couple weeks in the garage, but he didn't leave his keys in it!!

 

yeah, I believe I did, and replied back to you, didn't I? was it about the ebay thing?? or was that someone else that sent me that?? LOL

 

Yeah, it was the ebay thing. I made the mistake of using my hotmail account, and forgot it filters almost everything except those that come from allowed domains/emails. I still get spam tho... (huh?)

But yeah, trythe same but @gmail.com That should get to me. Luckily Gmail does their own filtering unlike hotmail which does their own spamming.... lol

It's good to have the junk account though....


I dunno, I thought it was weird, wish I had watched the auction so's I could get a better idea of the poster's ID info.