I had a long conversation yesterday with one of the service technicians at my dealer. I'm very friendly with him, and this was a long discussion about what might be responsible for so many dead batteries with the C6. This guy has been with GM for about 20 years and rally knows his stuff. Here are some of the points he made:

To really check for battery drain, the car has to be running for a while. After it's shut down, the dealer should monitor the drain over a period of at least 3 hours. He said just hooking up a VOM to the car and watching for a drain is useless. He frequently will keep a car for several days doing this procedure until he can spot an anomoly.

He has seen several GM cars drain batteries by having radios that continue to pull current even after thay are turned off and the car is off. After the radios were replaced, the cars were fine.

He had one case where they solved the drain by accidentally leaning against the rear window...it was warm. With this car, the rear window heater never shut off fully.

His feeling is that some piece of equipment is not shutting of completely. Finding that defect may be difficult but not, he felt, impossible. He also thought that most of the theories about garage door openers, cell phones, etc. causing the drains were pretty far fetched and the real problem ahd to be in the car itself. IF my battery ever goes dead, he wants to be the guy to figure it out. He said it may take several days, but he always finds the drain.

I'm just relating the gist of a one hour discussion we had. You may disagree with his observations, you may think he's full of it...which is fine. It's here for what it's worth.

 

I agree with th comments of your tech. It has to be within the car. Cell phones, garage door openers and even the infamous relay 46 are more grasping at straws. Have you asked him about the sensor that lets the computer know the transmission is in reverse? Another thing might be the alarm system itself i.e. if there is a motion sensor in that system motion around the vehicle and or simply touching the car may awake the computer ( I may be grasping her) the reverse sensor circuit is something that should be examined though.

 

 

Anyone remember the results of the poll for DBS a couple of months ago? What percentage of vehicles were manual tranny and what percentage were auto tranny?

 

I hope GM is aware of the electrical gremlins and can find a permanent fix for the '06 models

 

I wouldn't bet on it. GM never fixed the C5 problems throughout its production run (rocking drivers seat, fuel senders and it took yrs for the column key lock problem to be fixed).

 

I agree with your teck also, but till something is proved I have a open mind. I take note of anything I can find out about DBS, with the hopes of curing this problem
One thing I have found out threw my own experiences and correspondences with other C6 people.
MANY people report that after the car is correctely shut down they have had reason to open the trunk or door (sometimes hours later) Then later they car is in DBS mode. That is when they have experienced this problem. It’s possible that this wakes up something in the car that then does not go back into sleep mode.

PLEASE RUN THIS BY YOUR TECK!
Hopefully we can fix this problem
Dave

 

Do you know what the current drain is on a regular car. This is important in troubleshooting a problem. Thanks.

 

Direct from the last repair order from my Vert "FOUND AT REST 18.9MA
Acceptable per GM"


Note fob left in car will add 2 milavolts according to what I havr found out

 

I do this all the time and have never had the DBS on my Z51 MN6. Some car's have the problem other's don't. Makes it real difficult to find the problem.

 

Did the poll indicate the option level of DBS cars? How many of them were 1SB with heated seats and HUD? Something has to be sucking a fair amount of current, probably not a computer chip.

 

In my humble opinion, GM needes to address this issue, or they will REALLY pay in the future!
Just my 0.02 cents.

 

Experience counts MAJOR in tracking this bugger down. And I think that we have more of that on this forum than even a seasoned tech will ever have, because of our group-think process!

However....
Now we got adults trying to figure out these new fangled computers!

If something in the car isn't shutting down or off, why doesn't it happen the next day, or the next time you drive it?
If it was only ONE certain device that was misbehaving, I really think we'd have it knocked out by now.
Could it be RANDOM devices not shutting down? Sounds unlikely to me.
Could it be a random signal, generated from within or from elsewhere, that intermittently wakens the car? Or a software hang-up?
I would think that it would take a technician weeks or more of monitoring, with access to multiple C6's before that randon event occured and could be noted.

And I certainly don't mean to put down your tech in any way. I'm sure he has great hands-on experience. But, really, how many incidences of C6 DBS's has he worked with? And we probably have 100's right here.

 

Here's a poll:


http://forums.corvetteforum.com/show...ll&forum_id=74