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I parked my 02 Z06 in a store parking lot after about a 45 minute freeway drive. After I shut off the ignition, I realized I had parked next to a minivan with an elderly woman who was about to open the passenger door. I quickly restarted the car, shifted to reverse and as I began to back up the engine died. I thought I had just dumped the cluctch a little too quick so I restarted the car only to have the engine die just as before. This time I noticed a message on the DIC: Remove Key for ten seconds...(and it might have said restart, I can't remember). I was blocking traffic so I did the restart and die manouver a couple more times to roll it into a new parking spot. When I came out of the store 10 mintues later the car ran fine with no messages on the DIC. All of the gauges were reading normal.
I'm taking a road trip in the car this weekend and was hoping someone could assure me that this isn't a sign that I'm about to be stranded.
Can't offer any reassurance. That message is associated with an impending failure of the column lock. Might want to consider getting a bypass installed before you end up flatbedding to the dealer with a locked steering column.
This is the first problem that I have had in two years and 10,000 miles but it is frustrating to have to disconnect something because of a poor design.
Who has the best by pass? I found some information in the tech section on a C5 Solutions by pass but I could not find a link to C5 Solutions and a Yahoo search didn't turn them up either.
I'm not sure if it is column lock related or not, but when my car was new with only a couple of thousand miles on it, I had it happen to me on two different occasions. I think it has to do with the computer malfunctioning somehow on startup. Both times I removed the key for 10 seconds, restarted, and never had a problem. I have never had a column lock problem on my 2001, and it now has 25,000 miles on it.
I (and my girlfriend) buy opening and closing doors and me hitting the alarm while she was doing this confused the car at startup and I had to do the 10 second wait twice, this was over a year ago, never seen it since.
I drove over to Corvettes of Houston yesterday to buy their bypass kit. The counter sales guy told me that he didn't believe it was a column lock problem because the column did not lock with the "Remove Key for 10 Seconds" warning. He thinks the car went into the theft mode and killed the engine because the chip on the key wasn't read by the car's computer. He says the car can be started with a key that does not have a chip but the engine quickly dies. I don't know if this is true or not but I plan to clean the key and carry the spare key for a while and see what happens.
I had this happen to me once with my '02 Z06. I reached in through the open drivers window to open the door, because my wife, waiting in the car, had inadvertently locked the doors. I don't recall the alarm activating but the car did die about five seconds after I started it. Had to remove key and then it worked fine. Like an earlier poster said, I think it is possible to run afoul of the anti-theft system sometimes.