1995 Cadillac Fleetwood how to start it

ONEGUYNSF

MEMBER
1995 CADILLAC FLEETWOOD
V8
AUTOMATIC
98,000 MILES

I have a limo described above that has been sitting for 15 months in San Francisco Treasure Island parking lot. I am now trying to sell it. I live in Las Vegas but a friend of mind in SF looked at it but was concerned about jump starting it. He is not a mechanic and said he thought the "pipes" would break if he jumped it. When I parked the car the battery was only a few months old and the car had not been used much at all.

What should we do?

2 Replies

CARADIODOC

MECHANIC
33,873 POSTS

Not sure what the problem is. You can expect the battery to be dead after just one month due to all the computers on the car, but if the battery never froze, there's a good chance it will be okay. You have to understand that with a totally-dead battery, it will need to be charged or jump-started for a good 15 minutes before it STARTS to take a charge. It takes a little while for the acid in the battery to become conductive. When possible, the best is to connect a home battery charger and charge the battery at a slow rate for an hour or two. If all you have access to is jumper cables and another car, let the dead battery charge for 15 minutes before trying to start the engine. After that, if the engine does start, then is stopped, the battery may still not be charged enough to restart it. You'll likely need to drive the car for an hour to get the battery on its way to a full charge.

I've never heard of pipes breaking from a jump-start. What you really need though is someone you can trust to do it right. If the jumper cables are connected backward, it's easy to destroy multiple computers. At a minimum you'll blow a number of fuses. The red clamp on each end of the jumper cables goes to the positive terminal on both batteries. The black clamps go to both negative terminals.

GM batteries use tiny side-post terminals that don't allow much current to pass from jumper cables. As a result, don't expect the donor car to get yours started on its own. You have to give it plenty of time to charge your battery. Your partially-charged battery with the help of the other car should get your engine started.