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Old 03-15-2016, 01:16 PM
barry12345 barry12345 is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2012
Posts: 5,924
Quote:
Originally Posted by 97 SL320 View Post
I haven't seen a credible case where polarity proper jump starting has damaged electronics.

Trying to start a car with a weak battery could cause a problem. A few things occur here, when the starter solenoid / starter windings rapidly cycle in and out of the circuit due to a weak battery, this is what impresses high voltage spikes on the system. Think how an ignition coil works.

Electronics can be affected by this and any microprocessor is constantly being reset possible causing it to hang or have corrupted data. ( Any system like DAS chip in a key where data it read from the key and a new bit of data written back to the key, interrupt this process and the data is lost. )

Cluster does not work as in needles don't move or LCD / LED sections don't light up?
Does this dash have incandescent back lighting? It is possible the bulbs have failed.

Do we know for sure that something was left on or was that a guess? If the dash was failing and stayed on ( as in when you open the door some dashes wake up ) it may have drained the battery or the battery may have failed on it's own.

Hooking the dash to a diagnostic tool wold allow one to put in into test mode to sweep the dials / view what readings should be.
Boost enough cars and odds are you will get some damage. That one case can make you wish you had taken precautions. With the latest cars a few years old it may mean scrapping the car. Or a really high expense repairing on occasion is my current suspicion.

Anyways my self adopted approach years ago is fundamentally the same as Mercedes now recommends according to a poster on this thread. People can of course do as they wish and will normally get away with it. I did not.

The time you do not will live on in your memory and your ways probably will change forever. Also the damage can occur in the vehicle providing the boost.

I could try to figure out the sequence of events that occur. There is just no point as I have not used the old conventional boosting approach since our first casualty. I try to keep an open mind but it was not a coincidental issue.
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