Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Programming the car

New (new to me anyway) Mercury came with a couple of built in annoyances. An aggressive seat belt warning buzzer, and the automatic door locker. Although I do wear seat belts on the road, it's nice to be able to just move the car into the garage or over to the next driveway without listening to the buzzer nagging at me.
I googled for "Mercury seat belt buzzer" and sure enough, an answer came up. There is a disable procedure, it's printed in the owner's manual. The owner's manual is only 200 pages or so thick, and I need Google assistance to find anything in it. Wait til I need to lookup proper tire pressure...
Any how, the seat belt buzzer defeat only requires you to buckle and unbuckle the seat belt 9 times inside of 30 seconds. And the nasty noise goes away.
After this bit of wisdom from the owner's manual, I decided to press my luck and see what it said about disabling the auto door locker. Yes, it can be done. Press the power door unlock button three times in a row with the ignition on, and three more with the ignition off and it's gone.
Just a little programming and I have a nice polite car that doesn't bug me any more.

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