Monday 19th December 2016: 12.20am. Drove the old year 2000 Focus for the first time in a month today. It was driving weird, then went into limp home mode where there is no engine power to prevent damage which makes taking off at junctions at roundabouts no fun. So I plugged in my newly acquired ELM327 USB cable from eBay for a few quid that lets my laptop talk to the car's on-board computers. Turns out cylinder 3 is not firing, so the ECU put the car into emergency limp home mode. Which I found really very neat, even a sixteen year old car has fairly capable on-board computers. It'll likely be another spark plug cable has gone bad, they start to perish at this age. Thankfully they're very cheap to replace.
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