I have a Mercury Mountaineer. One morning it wouldn’t start. Since the battery was pretty old I decided it might be time to change it. So, I got a new battery and put it in. The car started once but it was a struggle. The gas pedal didn’t work, either. You could press it to the floor and the engine wouldn’t rev at all. I turned it off and tried to re-start it, but it wouldn’t catch.
So then I panicked and figured something was really wrong. I brought the battery back because I was low on funds at the time.
One thing led to another, though, and I ended up getting a new battery again. I put it in and tried it starting it again. No good. That’s when I saw that all the lights on the dashboard that had something to do with a major engine problem light up.
I spent a lot of time on the internet looking this stuff up and it turns out that when you change the battery in these beasts the on-board computer needs to take time to gather some meteorological information. Temperature, humidity, altitude, and who knows what else. If it doesn’t get this info it either doesn’t start or starts up in “limp home mode,” where there’s enough gas going to the engine to idle your way home (that would be the gas peddle not working). I had to wait almost two hours to be able to drive it again.
When I buy another car, I think I’ll be going here and buy something that doesn’t have a computer in it.