Technical oddities

I happened to be talking to a tradesman and the conversation turned to diagnosing problems. About a year ago he purchased a Chrysler 200 for 60% of Kelly Blue Book. It had 4 previous owners but appeared to be well maintained.

Two months later it needed a new battery. Two months after that, it needed another new battery. Then another. The vehicle was eating batteries.

He took many trips to Youtube and consulted AI. Finally, he and his boy simply started disconnecting and reconnecting the terminal on the battery...and then they heard the vehicle make a faint noise that wasn't supposed to be there. It was intermittent. It made that noise only about 20% of the time.

"I know it is strange, but the sound didn't sound like OEM MOPAR. We kept looking."

It was a GPS monitor that the first owner, a car rental business, had installed way up under the dash where it would not be seen by customers. They had not bothered to remove the unit before they sold the vehicle. The tradesman's best-guess is that the unit recorded exactly where the vehicle went and was attempting to find a signal to up-load the data. That kind of information might be useful if there were clauses in the rental contract about not taking vehicles four-wheeling, parking them on ocean beaches or using them to pull stumps.

The tradesman and his boy removed the device and the vehicle no longer eats batteries.

I did not see this with my own eyes so I cannot vouch for its veracity. Consequently, I only present this as an interesting story. If you have a vehicle that eats batteries, try parking it where it gets four bars or figure out a way to disable the GPS transmitter module(s).