car crash

[cellio]

No, not hardware.

I had to reboot my car this morning. I still don't know what happened.

My car, like almost every car built in the last N years, has a remote control. There are buttons for "lock" and "unlock"; for the latter, press once to affect the driver's door only and twice to affect all doors. (A single press of "lock" affects all doors.) The car does not appear to preserve state for any significant length of time; I have not conducted experiments yet to determine the timeout between presses of "unlock".

This morning I needed to get something out from the passenger's side, so I pressed twice, retrieved the item, and a few minutes later got into the car and drove off.

Now when you lock the car using the remote control, the car's alarm system is supposed to automatically activate. You know that this has happened because of a little light that comes on. There is no documented way to deactivate the alarm.

When I got to work and locked the car, the light didn't come on. I pressed the lock button again, thinking my car was somehow weirdly stateful after all; no change. I unlocked and relocked; no change. Eventually I unlocked the car, got in, put the fancy electronic key into the ignition, removed it, got out, and locked. That time it worked.

I still have no idea what happened. This is not covered in the manual, nor did the UI provide sufficient hints.

Comments

[jducoeur]

There is no documented way to deactivate the alarm.

Hmm. In my car, there's actually a physical switch. You unlock the car and deactivate the alarm, then throw the switch into the down position; from that point, until you throw the switch to the up position and relock using the remote, the alarm is deactivated.

Of course, this isn't documented anywhere. I found it by accident: the switch is by the driver's left foot, and I simply knocked it by accident. I brought it down to the dealership, and realized that this was a FAQ when the girl at the service desk just said "hang on a second", crawled under the steering wheel, and said "try it now"...

[cellio]

Heh. You'd think that if it's that much of a FAQ they'd give you some hint ahead of time, whether in the documentation or from the dealer directly when you buy it. But maybe I'm reacting to the painfully-long lecture I sat through on how a dead battery could reset the anti-theft device on the stereo (yes, the stereo has its own anti-theft device), and what arcane steps I'll need to take if that happens. Mind, the arcane steps will have been long-forgotten by then, but I suppose the point of the lecture is to help me remember that there are arcane steps and I can find them in the manual. Shrug. Seemed a funny thing to focus on when, I realized after the fact, he had never told me how to get the car into reverse! (It's a funny push-then-move operation, which is different from my previous car. I hadn't realized until I tried to back out of my parking space that day at work that the test drive had not involved reverse. Oops.)

[jducoeur]

You'd think that if it's that much of a FAQ they'd give you some hint ahead of time, whether in the documentation or from the dealer directly when you buy it.

Well, this is the same dealership that was responsible for msmemory's horrible experiences this year. They didn't suck *that* badly when I bought mine, which suckered us into coming there again. But I should have gotten suspicious earlier...