Erratic door locks
 

I have 2006 Uplander with all the bells and whistles. Driving home from work last night, my door locks kept locking and unlocking on their own. Can anybody tell me what might be going on and how to fix it?

Thanks,
Inari

I had a Saturn that did that, it was the battery, you might check that.

Thanks for info. Are you talking about the car battery or the key fob battery? I will check the car battery if what I've already done doesn't work.

I read on-line elsewhere that this once happened to another Uplander owner because the key fob was malfunctioning. They solved the problem by taking the battery out of it and then putting it back in to "reboot" it. Co-incidentally, I had just replaced the battery right before this started.

Last night -- I'm not sure if I did this before I went online or after -- I went into the "bells and whistles" menu on my dash and disabled the automatic door lock function. (I found the instructions in the owner's manual which I previously downloaded for free onto my computer.) The changes worked and I no longer have the automatic door lock, or its erratic behavior, but I can't get rid of the message that told me to press the "unlock" button on the key fob to save the changes. (Which are already saved.)

After looking at the manual again, it also turns out I didn't properly synchronize the key fob after changing the battery. I was supposed to hold down the "lock" and "unlock" buttons on the fob for a full SEVEN seconds. Once I did that I got the dash message that this battery is ALSO low, along with "unlock to save changes" message. I'm assuming that both these messages will go away once I buy a brand new battery, and re-synchronize the key fob again.

The car battery.

I put a fresh battery in the key fob and synchronized it, but still got the "save changes" error message on the instrument panel dashboard. Then I talked to my ex, who used to pull wrenches for a living. He told me an automobile's computer is like your computer at home. If it starts behaving erratically, just reboot it to get the bugs out. Disconnect the negative cable of the battery for 10 minutes, then reconnect it again. After you do this, don't program or reprogram anything on it until you've driven sit awhile and it has reset itself. It did this and now everything is back to normal. There are no error messages on the dash and the door locks are now automatically locking when I start driving -- like they are supposed to -- but are no longer erratically going off during my commute.

Inari