320d Efficient Dynamics - Starting itself after being locked?

Soldato
Joined
26 Sep 2007
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Newcastle
Went to Sainsburys today for some dinner and as we were walking towards the store we noticed a 320d parked up with it's engine running. We had a quick look round, couldn't see anybody, didn't think much of it so carried on into the store. Came out and it was still there, still running with nobody around. My mate went back into the store to tell the Customer Services desk about it and one of the security guards came out.

He said he'd been stood there for about an hour and half earlier waiting for someone to come back to it only to be told that it's normal. He started spouting on about how it's stop stop condensation building up in the exhaust and it's not really the engine running, it's just ticking over at low revs and doesn't use petrol (well, it's a diesel for one!). He showed us the doors were locked. At this point I gave up trying as either he was making it up as he went, or the original owner didn't know either.

I looked it up when I got back to the office and found only one case of this. Start/Stop shutting down the engine as you park, and as the owner didn't press the stop button, it supposedly was able to start itself back up later on.

I was wondering if anyone else had heard of this, or if it was a really odd fault? Bit scary to think that your car could randomly start itself up after you've parked it up! You could either come back to a lot less fuel as a best case scenario, or find that someone's smashed the window, hopped in and half inched it!

A single post I managed to find:
http://www.car4play.com/forum/post/index.htm?t=14237
 
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On the E9x cars you could start the car, stop the engine, remove the key, restart the car and get out and lock the doors with the engine running.
 
I seem to recall that the EF cars do this when the batteries are low on charge.

None will run on their own. If the battery is low they just turn off the ED functions when the car is used (i.e.stop/start, brake regeneration etc) to enable the car to charge the battery.
 
None will run on their own. If the battery is low they just turn off the ED functions when the car is used (i.e.stop/start, brake regeneration etc) to enable the car to charge the battery.

I just looked up the source, it was talking about a Clifford alarm for remote start. No idea where I got that from... Old age comes not alone.
 
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