My mother just moved back to my country after divorcing her American husband and living in the States. When I went to pick her up at the airport, the car was working fine. Since she´s here I´ve had nothing but car trouble. I'm sure she jinxed it.

When she got in the car, the car refused to start. Luckily my brother was at the airport too, and he had jumper cables so he parked his car beside me. I tried to open the hood, but the hood latch refused to release the hood. I popped the grille out and manually released the latch. I broke four of the six grille clips and lost the damn latch spring when I did that. My brother connected the jumper cables and the car refused to start. The starter engine didn´t even turn. The computer display was just showing eights (display test). After about ten minutes of analyzing my options I tried once more and the engine started. I let the battery charge for about 5 minutes, then I turned the car off, removed the jumper cables and started it again perfectly.

On the way home from the airport my uncle asked me to turn the A/C on. WTF the stupid A/C was blowing hot air. I changed the low pressure A/C switch in June and had not been able to really test the A/C since since the weather had been cold. Seems like that was not really the problem.

Yesterday we had a welcome home party for Mom here at home. I wanted to move my car to make room for several guests' cars in the parking area. When I started the car, the engine made this really weird noise, and the service light went on. I immediately shut the engine off. I pooped the hood, called my dad and asked him to listen to the engine starting. It started fine, but the service light was on. I took the car out for a spin and about 2 minutes later the service light just turned off by itself. Since this is my wife's car and I didn't want her to have any car trouble during the week, I tried to use the car as much as possible yesterday to see if it would fail. I used it four times and every single time it was the same story with the service light. On after starting the car, off after two minutes.

Any ideas guys? I'll pull the codes this week. But maybe this is typical.

96 850 T5 Sedan, 148000 kms.

 

Ok, just got a valid answer from another forum. The service light is turning on for 2 mins just to remind me that it's time for a 5000 mile service. I confirmed that in my service manual.