Good afternoon,

I have recently picked up a 1993 1.6 16V Ford Fiesta Ghia with three keys - the red key, black key and key/remote fob.

The car has been sat for two years and subsequently the battery has lost its charge, upon connecting a new battery the alarm sounds.

I have tried closing all the doors and unlocking/locking with all three different keys to no success, when I try to turn the ignition with any of the three keys the lights on the instrument cluster light up but the car won't even attempt to turnover. The immobiliser light by the clock is illuminated permanent red.

The remote key fob appears to not have any battery as the vehicle won't unlock at the press of the button though surely this shouldn't make a difference if I have the master key anyway? My next step is to put a new battery in the fob and see whether unlocking the vehicle with it may work.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Many thanks,
James

Sounds like either incorrect transponders in the keys or the pats receiver is duff.

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8 hours ago, Jvenning said:

I have tried closing all the doors and unlocking/locking with all three different keys to no success, when I try to turn the ignition with any of the three keys the lights on the instrument cluster light up but the car won't even attempt to turnover. The immobiliser light by the clock is illuminated permanent red.

Do any in the keys, when in the ignition, silence the alarm?

I know little about cars of this vintage, but on all the Fords I have looked at, the central locking / alarm and the immobiliser are almost entirely separate systems. The only links I know of are that a valid PATS key in the ignition should both silence the alarm and enable the remote control programming function to work.

If the PATS system is duff, then it is unlikely a new keyfob battery will help, the key will probably have lost its coding, and need to be re-programmed, which needs a valid PATS key in the ignition.

Assuming this car has a similar PATS system to later cars, the PATS transponder that Clive referred to is around the ignition barrel.

So I think investigating whether there really is a PATS (immobiliser) problem is a priority, perhaps after finding a way to silence the alarm sounder by cutting a wire or finding a connector to remove. Later cars flash out a code on the PATS LED, and can be interrogated by diagnostic systems for PATS errors, to narrow it down to a transponder, ECU or key problem. But I am not sure how many systems will talk to a 1993 car. If all the lights on the dash come up normally, it may just be a stater relay fault. Later cars have some rather odd dash displays if immobilised.