When I engage the parking brake on my Rapide, the icon stays lit on the dash after the car is locked. What could be causing this?

 

you never know with the safety items on new cars. some sensor may be still be within proximity of your key fob or something. i know that there are still a lot of electronic gizmos working on my 2007 vantage after i lock the car. they usually stop working after a few minutes, at most. i'd probably leave my keys behind and sneak back after five minutes or so and see what's what.

 

^^ The key fob has no proximity functions, but I'll give that a try tomorrow. Thanks.

I was thinking maybe it needs the CTEK or it's just a phantom thing that just goes away. I use the parking brake when parking in public, not in my garage. I was thinking of leaving it on tonight, but did not want to risk battery drain.

 

If you have a somewhat low battery the parking brake will have a fit with low voltage. Try having the car running and cycle the parking brake on/off 2 times as it may have lost its memory point. And by all means plug it in regardless of what you think.

 

I tried the multiple on/off of the parking brake to no avail. I just plugged in the CTEK and will try again later today.

 

Now I saw the running lights on out of nowhere. Later the LED strip on the headlights were on. Both time unlocking the car fixed it. The whole time the car was on the CTEK. When I checked the car this morning, everything was off and normal.

I wonder if it's the battery? It's about 4-5 years old. The car is regularly driven for about 4K miles a year.

 

Running lights turned on by themself and then went off.

 

I would bet the battery is on it's way out. Modern cars do very weird things when batteries get low/to their end point.

 

I test drove a vantage where this happened. The owner then showed me a trick where he jiggled the handle and it turned off. You probably tried that already but FYC.

I didn’t buy that car

 

Jiggled which handle?

 

I was talking about the parking brake handle in the vantage assuming it had the same. looking at Rapid interiors online looks like they may be electric or doesn’t have a traditional lever. My bad in that case!

 

4-5 years is incredibly a long time for a modern battery. I always try to remember when it was last replaced and it seems like just a few years. Reality it's longer, #1 thing is any electronic issue is checking the battery status. Driving a car doesn't necessarily charge a battery. Tender is the best way to maintain it.

 

driving a car actually does charge your battery, AFAIK, unless its not working for some reason. same with a tender.

OTOH, modern cars that are NOT being driven will eventually discharge the battery, so when not driving them for days or weeks on end it's best to either physically disconnect the battery, at the expense of possibly losing those oh-so-important (ha) personal seat positioning and stereo) or hook it up to a trickle charger.

 

They do charge to an extent, but if you actually test a battery before and after driving it's minimal. Not arguing with you but the best way to have a 100% battery is to have an alternative charger when at rest.

 

I regularly drive year round for 4000 miles. Use a CTEK during the winter.