Major computer screw-up

Faults and Technical chat for the Volvo XC40
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Gnomeface
Posts: 62
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2019 8:15 pm

Post by Gnomeface »

Our 11-month old T5 Insignia Pro gave my wife a major problem today. She started and drove slowly round the half-mile of one-way lanes to get out of our village then tried to accelerate away, only to find that the car would not exceed 25mph! She discovered that the speed limiter was locked on and she couldn't turn it off using the select buttons on the steering wheel - and the Adaptive Cruise Control icon (she uses ACC all the time) had disappeared from the options screen and that there were far fewer icons than normal! She was also getting uncomfortably warm before finding that the heated seats and the internal temperature were all turned on and at maximum. At this point she stopped to let the following queue of traffic past and rang me to find out what the h*ll I'd done to the settings (we each have our own settings linked to our keys), as I'd driven around 100 miles in the car yesterday.

I hadn't reset anything, although I'd noticed that in the last few miles yesterday the stop-start system had been re-starting the engine as soon as I lifted my foot off the brake - and it even released the auto handbrake on one occasion, although not every time.

At my request she turned everything off then restarted the car and it seemed to work OK, except that for the rest of her journey the stop-start kept re-starting the instant she released the foot brake - but at least the auto-handbrake did stay on every time.
I suggested that before she started her return trip later in the day that she waited for 30 seconds in the car after unlocking, then held the start button for 5+ seconds without her foot on the brake so that the ignition would turn on fully, then wait another 30 seconds before actually starting the engine. This was in the hope that the computer systems in the car could all initialise themselves without interfering with each other, hopefully clearing any glitches.

She had no further problems and the car seemed to have reset itself, although I haven't had a chance to check through everything yet. This is very worrying on a car less than a year old and with under 7,000 miles on the clock. Maybe it's time to get the recall done (I've just had a second letter about it) and have the whole system checked out at the same time.
Family car - XC40 T5 Inscription Pro, Glacier Silver, charcoal leather, Intellisafe Pro and Xenium packs. Dog guard and mud flaps added since.
Fun car - Mercedes SLC

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