Hi. I am new to this forum, but I have been reading it off and on for years. I'm 38 and live in Ojo Sarco, New Mexico. I have many years experience as a hack mechanic. I have a degree in Math and run a nonprofit for families. So, my girlfriend bought this a8 about a year ago and I have been helping her to keep it running. For the most part this has gone well, but I did a very stupid thing. I have this experimental house-sit where I am developing some designs for my nonprofit involving off-grid living. One of my first experiments was running the place off of one of my motorcycles (I don't have a driver's license so I ride motorcycles semi-illegally) using it to generate 12V. It worked for a while but I blew the stator on it. At the same time, she and I bought a 1500W inverter at harbor freight to run a very expensive automatic espresso maker I borrowed from a friend of mine a while back. So, with my bike now out of commission, we tried to run the coffee maker off of her audi as a test, mostly to see if the inverter worked. So with her revving the motor and me at the controls, we tried to fire off a nice warm shot of espresso. We are both really into coffee, and this is like a $2k machine we are talking about. It makes really perfect coffee, and we are making a go of doing a cafe type operation off-the-grid for the purposes of renewable energy research. It is a part of an ongoing project I am working on. So the machine did not work and since then neither does her car.

My thoughts were initially that it must be an immobilizer issue, so I recoded the radio, no luck.

So I ordered a super VAG K+Pro scanner and tried to change the odometer, hack the car computer, and reset the immobilizer, to no avail. No luck, although I could hear some relays clicking around and the car made some beeps and told me a couple times that it was OK.

I have looked the car over extensively and have found several fuse panels. So many that I am pretty convinced that there are more, that this car has fuse panels hidden everywhere. I have checked every fuse and relay I can find and they all seem to be OK. I am ok with checking all the wiring but I really have no idea which ones to check first and don't really just want to start checking them all because I imagine there are around 1,000 and most of them are not easy to find or check.

Also I have the Bentley publishing DVD for the car but can't access it because I have to call them and it is Martin Luther King Day. Long live the King.

So I am really stumped. I am far from a professional audi tech, but I do possess an uncanny knack to fix things, and basic tools.

If anybody can help I would be extremely grateful. We live on a mountain and our other car is a rear wheel drive Volvo 240 which we just picked up. I have ditched it and so has she. Thank god our neighbors are cool and have trucks and can chain us out.

This is really stressful for me. My thoughts are now that I melted the battery and maybe I should buy a new one. The car starts for a second and dies. It seems to be ok when it runs for the few seconds it runs for. It thows DTS codes for implausible TCU and battery and low fuel and misfiring. It has fuel. The battery does seem to not be taking a charge when I charge it, but I jumped it to a charged battery, with the same result.

Thanks for reading. Hope I don't sound like a total idiot. If I do you can tell me and I will try to tone it down and act smarter. Please, though, help me if you can.