"What's the problem?" "Car won't start." "Did you try restarting it?"

rcxdude · on Jan 11, 2015

No joke, I have seen a car which would occasionally refuse to start (with no indication of an error: the dash was basically blank) until you disconnected the battery, waited a few minutes, and then reconnected it.

wiredfool · on Jan 11, 2015

Disconnecting the battery and waiting is how to clear the fault flag on ODB-1 era GM cars/trucks (at least, probably others as well.) And if you short two pins on the ODB connector, then power on, it will flash trouble codes on the check engine light.

And apparently some of them have 160 or 8192 baud serial on that connector, with really expensive cables, unless you're handy with an arduino or similar. Now that the truck is working, I'm not sure I need to do this... yet.