The battery in my S has been having problems for some time now, ie slow turn-over on start, but today it refused to turn over at all. Just got a clicking noise and no started motor. I was going to roll start it (like I did 4 days ago), but then thought maybe it is worse than that and then the car will be stranded down the street. No worries - I'll jump start it with the family car.

Being a careful guy, I got the manual out to see if it mentions anything. I was actually expecting it to say don't jump start at all, but I found that not only does it not say not to jump start, (read it again, that does make sense), there is a list of instructions. Great, I always forget the correct order to put the leads on anyway. The manual even has helpful pictures of exactly where the leads go, but then I noticed that the picture has the battery on the left side of the engine, and hence they have a spot for the Negative jumper lead on the right side of the engine.

Now since as I understand it the whole point of having the negative lead on the chassis instead of the battery is to avoid any battery gas causing an explosion, it seems like putting the lead on the chassis 5cm from the battery is a bad idea. Plus I couldn't even tell where the diagram in the manual was telling me to attach it anyway. So then I started looking around for somewhere else to attach the lead on the left side of the engine bay, and after trying a couple of places that didn't work I finally put it up near the firewall and it worked fine.


Who else has jump started before and where did you attached the neg lead? And what was the spot the manual recommended anyway? (in fact it said "don't put it anywhere else"). Just curious.

Guess I'll have to go buy a new battery sooner rather than later. It's a MY00 car with over 100K on the clock, so I've done alright with the original battery, plus I have QuikTrak (or Multitrak or whatever it is called now) which has always been a bit of an issue if the car wasn't run for a week or so. Any battery recommendations?

 

I just connect terminal to terminal. I've never heard this thing about the negative earth being related to battery gases. I'm under the undertsaing it was just a good way of allowing an earth anywhere around the vehicle.

 

Mine died through the week. Tried a jump start by rolling down the hill and getting it to turn over, but nothing, so it was then stuck at the bottom of the hill of my driveway.

Jump started it with the help of 1 of the other cars, and drove it back to the top. Took the battery out, charged it, put it back in. Still nothing.

Conclusion: Battery is ****ed.

Autobahn -> New Century battery -> Working S2K