A box full of neutrals........

[Big Ed]

I had a day off from work today. Nice dry day, so I thought I'd pop to the city to get some food for dinner. Lovely drive in to Truro, parked up, went shopping, got back in the 400. Selected reverse, went nowhere.

The car then went into neutral and that's where it stayed! Couldn't even remove the key. 

The dash lit up and the car wasn't happy. 

The lady at Lotus Assistance was great and the chap from the AA - a very nice man. 

A disconnect of the battery terminals solved it and he cleared the error code. No problem since. 

Ive had the 400 for three weeks, the creaky seat is annoying and today was a piss boiler. I hope my new car doesn't play up again. 

[ramjet]

I would think that with most cars these days, as so much is governed by computers, a lot of answers fall into the 'Have you disconnected the power and waited a few minutes, then turned it back on?'

That doesn't help as it doesn't diagnose what caused the fault. I think the catch may be that there wasn't a fault. Just a glitch in the booting.

My wife's Honda did it the other day with the cruise control. Would not turn on. Stopped the car, turned off, turned back on, resumed trip. Cruise control worked again. Go figure.

[Steve V8]

Hi Ed, not a Lotus specific problem. I had the same problem with a 6 series BMW.

We're you in a hurry?  if you switch off and pull the key before the systems have sorted themselves out the car will immobilise itself. I had to do a hard reset (disconnect battery for 30 minutes)several times, until I realised it was me causing the problem, not the car.

[ramjet]

I think that is what I may have done the day that Liz's Hondas cruise control played up. Did not wait and moved off before car had gone through all it's checks.

[JayEmm]

Total stab in the dark, but any chance the inertia switch somehow triggered itself?

Also @Big Ed I wouldn't bank on that being the last of your issues. Possibly worth being proactive and checking that other items have been sorted (eg. has your car had the MAF update, etc)

[Bibs]

If it was the inertia switch, it would need to be manually reset.