Tahoe Dave

My 2005 sat for 3 weeks, with the battery tender hooked up. I uncovered the car, the automatic door immediately responded, opened the hood and unplugged the tender.

The seat automatically adjusted, lights were bright on the dash and I hit the start button. Everything went dark!? I waited one minute, all the lights came back on and the message on dash was, "steering column locked"

I went to start it again and all went dark, again. I waited another couple of minutes and she started right up and all is okay.

It's almost like the car shut down and went into hibernation. I will add, once it was running the charging was at 14.5 and after 5 miles was going back and forth between 14.5 and 14.2

Any ideas out there as to what might have caused this?

dgrant3830

I'll venture a guess that your battery cable connections are suspect or the cable connections at the solenoid.

EDinPA

search for threads on steering column lock solenoid. If I recall, it's about a 1k fix.

CH-Z51

Its probably something simple, your charging system should maintain more consistency.

cclive

The Gremlin wasn't a very good car anyway....you should sell it and get a Corvette.

dgrant3830

I happen to know of a Gremlin that was awesome...of course, we changed the engine out to something a whole lot larger, a-frame, driveshaft, rebuilt the engine with new toys in it, hooker headers and etc...total "sleeper". Sucker was very, very fast. Heard it eventually got wrapped around a telephone pole somewhere in Texas.

StKnoWhere

+1 for loose connections or could be a bad battery (not enough cranking amps)

Checkout this thread, especially post 4.

AORoads

But seriously, OP if the above suggestions don't help, you may just think about a new battery. Depending on when your car was built, it could be 5 years old by now, or more. And the 14.2 and 14.5 aren't that unusual; mine does it, too, occasionally. But usually it's a little less.

not08crmanymore

My 05 did that once.Hard to say if the battery is bad or it was just an electrical anomoly that 05's get sometimes.Get the reflash for that column lock though.

Jimini

Had that happen to me a couple of years ago. Were the wheels pointed straight when you parked the car? If there's pressure on the wheel lock pin when you turn it over you can get that message.