"Security" light

[Dr. Pimento]

I've got the security light going on about half the time I drive the car.. what in the world does that stand for?

I can understand "Check Engine", but.... SECURITY?

Has my car been hijacked without me knowing it, or..?

[WhisQuila]

The security light, the one on the dashboard i'm assuming, in my 97 lesabre just blinks when the car is off and a door is open.

I'm pretty sure that its supposed to blink whenever the car is off.... but my car is screwy.

If its blinking when your driving down the road something is strange. I've never had mine come on when i was driving.

[Dr. Pimento]

It doesn't blink at all - it stays on, solid. Some trips it doesn't come on at all.. other trips it waits 15 minutes to come on.. and sometimes it's on by the time I'm out of the driveway.

[tman]

Do you have Pass Key-2? Thats the key with the resistor chip in it. All a security light means is that the resistor, is not able to be read by the ignition switch. Normally, the ignition switch must have a correctly cut key, plus the resistor must equal what the ignition switch is programmed to look for. The Security Light just means that the VATS (Vehicle Ant-Theft System) is unable to read the resistor, meaning if any joe cool picked your lock, they'd get the car.

[Dr. Pimento]

I do have the chip-security key.

What good does the "security" light do, if it's just trying to tell me that it can't read the key? I mean - shouldn't it not start if it can't read it?

[tman]

Whats happened is that the resistance value is being sent to the VATS, but there is a short(common problem) inside the VATs unit itself, which is not interpreting the signal, so no signal is sent to the VATS unit, thus raising no alarm to the unit, because it doesn't know there is a key in the ignition. When the car is started, it ignores the fact that it hasn't gotten a signal from the ignition switch. This can be fixed one of 2 ways:

effective way- Replace, or resolder the VATS unit

redneck way- remove the security bulb, OR tell anyone that asks that it's the onstar light.

[Dr. Pimento]

Actually, I think I'll have flashes of theatrical paranoia, and pretend that my model of the LeSabre was custom-made with a miniature nuclear reactor, and that "safety" probably means a malfunction in the cooling unit. See what kind of reactions I get from my passengers.

In addition to the "effective" and "redneck" ways, I choose:

THE LAZY way:
"Continue ignoring the problem completely, thereby expending the least possible energy"

[tman]

It's not nuclear, its electrical!

You need a flux capacitor to pull that off.

[Dr. Pimento]

One point twenty-one gigawatts!
.. I think!

Of course, since that's the minimum system requirements for Doom3 (what a cpu hog!), we may have to scale that slightly. How does 5.78Gwts sound?

[sallisonbrown]

Try spraying some WD40 into the ignition keyhole and work the key in and out a couple of times to see if the resistor will be recognized better.

If that doesn't work, I like the "Onstar" excuse.

[ponchonutty]

There's not much you can do as a quick fix on this system. It is usually that the small wires break inside the colum. The only real fix is to replace the system (about $100 if you do it yourself). The other is to cut the VATS wires under the dash and install the proper resistor value inline to the wires that go to the BCM. I have fixed and bypassed these systems alot! Here's some info based on a Fiero but it's all the same. http://home.t-online.de/home/O_Scholz/vats.html