Except I couldn't. I started the car, the RPMs rose like normal, then died about 2 seconds later. The second time I started the car I put my foot on the gas right after starting to try and keep the engine going, and the RPMs rose a bit higher as expected but then died after the same length of time. After that, my car just cranked and cranked but never started. No engine codes. The clock in the dashboard was also reset to 12:00 every time I tried to start, but the radio didn't lock so it wasn't a complete loss of battery power or anything. I towed it to a shop near home since I was 60 miles away from home at the time. They said that fuel delivery seems fine, the fuel injectors are getting power but have no pulse and aren't shooting fuel. So something is stopping the ECU from telling the injectors to squirt. The shop has tried replacing the camshaft position sensor and the crankshaft position sensor with no luck. They now think it is either a faulty ECU or broken wires somewhere, but they said the car isn't behaving like it's a broken wire. It's also a lot cheaper diagnostically to try the ECU next.
They said they can't 100% rule out the immobilizer, which was one of my initial ideas, but they don't think that's the problem. At this point, I'm tempted to have the car towed back to my house and try a new immobilizer (~$50) and then a cloned ECU (~$200) from ARD Tuning, since the shop has already done all the hard work of checking cam and crank sensors.
Has anyone else had similar symptoms (car initially dying on startup, cranking but not starting, and clock resetting without full battery loss) or have any ideas on how to diagnose or fix my car?
I'll post back once I figure it out... hate coming across open ended threads
