Car Computers Need Reboot, Too

My Honda Civic Hybrid Needed a Reboot

To say I was surprised is a slight understatement. I take it for granted that computers need periodic reboots, most especially computers that run the Windows operating system, but it never occurred to me that my car might need one, too.

First the mysterious symptoms:

In city driving I noticed that very suddenly my battery charge would drop down to one bar or even none and the car would start acting very sluggish. This was even more likely to happen when the air conditioning was on but could also happen without a/c or heat on. Always the batteries would charge back up quite quickly, though, so it was never hazardous. This never ever happened during freeway driving. It also wasn't consistent in city driving, it only happened on some certain drives, leading to my being perplexed and wondering if it was something I did while driving.

The event that sent me to the dealership: suddenly my air conditioning stopped working. I immediately suspected that might be related to the batter power problem, so I took the car in at the earliest opportunity.

The diagnosis:

This was complicated by the fact that the a/c unit started working again after letting the car sit over night. Oh how aggravating it is to arrive for an early morning service appointment only to have to tell the service technician "well, it stopped doing that". Anyway, I informed the mechanics that the a/c suddenly worked again, but I had this other mysterious power problem with my batteries and did they think the two were related?

The expert called over to hear my strange tale said he thought it was the computer and said they would reset it. The person who wrote up the paperwork afterward wrote that they reset the batteries. Whether there's a slight difference between resetting the computer versus resetting the batteries, I don't know, but that most certainly fixed the problem. That's the reason why I'm writing this — in case anyone else ever wonders what might be causing their battery voltage to fluctuate suddenly.

Some quick statistics:

I get 40mpg average most of the time, no matter how I drive. I can ignore all of the smart driving techniques that are supposed to improve mileage, and drive like gas costs mere pennies (ha ha) and still always get 40mpg. I also can get 55mpg when I drive more thoughtfully and am careful to maximize the mileage.

In closing, I want to say that I love this car. It's just the perfect car in my opinion. When I win $100 million in the lottery, I will buy one for everyone in my family.