- Yardley wrote:
- It just did it twice and my keys are sitting here on the table. I hate that I can't lock my car. I forgot that this used to happen with my old '98 occasion. But this seems to happen a lot with this car.
The remote may be worn. You may need to buy a new "shell" and move your remote's guts into that. The shell comes with new buttons for the contact pads on the remote guts.
I replaced a worn shell with an aftermarket once, it didn't end well. The aftermarket was "cool" - it had glow-in-the-dark buttons and a blue (instead of black) case. I also got a pink one.
The pink one fit the remote's guts, works fine, I gave it to my spouse.
My blue one did not fit the remote's guts right and would fire off one function or another for any reason or no reason. Give it the stink-eye? It would fire. Put in pocket and walk? It would fire. Pick it up and press a button? It might or might not fire.
It took a while to figure out what was going on. The problem was fixed by putting the old rubber membrane buttons, along with the remote's guts, into the new shell.
If you look at my old, OE button membrane compared to my new replacement glow-in-the-dark one, there are subtle differences in the shape and size of the buttons such that if you used the glow-in-the-dark button membrane that came with the new shell it did not fit in the new case correctly (buttons binding "on") and as well would fire very very easily (buttons too tall). I imagine filing the case holes would have fixed the binding. My guess is whoever wrote the spec for the button mold didn't think through the problem all the way, or there was a materials issue (or two).
[the following is off topic but may be interesting to some of you]
Another thing to watch out for, the Riviera's electrical systems work funny (if at all) when the car's battery is near/at the end of its useful life due to age or damage. You might/should load test your battery. Some places do that for free but you have to watch out for how the test is conducted, it's not that hard to make a serviceable, good (but not new) battery fail it.
On the Riviera, a good proxy for the load test is to use any decent voltmeter, disconnect the battery (under the rear seat) and measure voltage. If voltage is less than 12.6 volts, you have a somewhat discharged and possibly bad battery. If below 12.2 volts, you probably have a battery nearing end of life, although it may be recoverable for a while using the 'reconditioning' function of an electronic car battery charger. If below 12 volts, you most likely have a bad battery and if the battery's not that old then you might/should do other testing to see if something else is wrong with the car (the trunk light is stuck "on" for instance).
Quick and dirty explanation for those who're interested: The car battery has 6 cells, each of which should show at least 2.1 volts with a voltmeter, under no load. Over time they weaken, and if fully discharged can fail. An accurate but imprecise (call it "quick and dirty") test for battery capability is just to measure the voltage, because it happens that voltage varies consistently with the state of the battery's chemistry. There is a little variation depending on battery type, because different chemistries have differing charge characteristics. In general, the following obtains:
State of Charge Sealed or Flooded Lead Acid battery Gel battery AGM battery
100% 12.70+ 12.85+ 12.80+
75% 12.40 12.65 12.60
50% 12.20 12.35 12.30
25% 12.00 12.00 12.00
0% 11.80 11.80 11.80 |
What is happening here: It is always the case that E=IR (voltage = current times resistance). Since a battery always has some sort of internal resistance, the voltage is a function of the current it can produce times the internal resistance across the measuring circuit, in general. So you can reckon the battery's state just by measuring it, no-load, with a voltmeter (the voltmeter inserts a small resistance in order to measure voltage at all), if you know what it would measure when 100% good. The 0% value in the table above assumes *none* of the cells are shorted. For each cell shorted, the max voltage you're going to get goes down by a couple more volts. For instance, if one cell is bad the most voltage you'll measure would be around 10v. You'd typically see this in a relatively new battery that got too deeply discharged and shorted a cell. The point here is that a voltmeter lets you *very* quickly determine, with acceptable accuracy, whether your battery's had it.
The practical bottom line, then, is that anytime your car battery is showing less than 75% when checked, no-load with a voltmeter, is a time you should suspect something is wrong. Question is what is wrong and how bad. Maybe the battery is just worn out. If it won't generate more than 450CCA, (and it is more than say 7 years old) then with respect to the Riv it is done. If it is younger than that, suspect too many deep discharges, or a bad parasitic load - find and fix it. Trunk light stuck on, intermittent short in the drivers door wiring harness (that was a thing on the 96s some years ago, where the wires pass thru the door jamb), general corrosion on the body ground points - whatever - there are reasons and you need to find them or else your new battery may die early.
