resetting the car?
 

touching the batt cables together when disconnected, is a way many cars reset (like a PC does ctrl-alt-del)...does that hold true for our 5th gen?

see here:

http://rl.acurazine.com/forums/showthread.php?t=847010

I don't know about resetting the car?????
Shorting the pos+ and neg - cable will just accelerate the bleed off of the stored energy of any of the capacitors in the system.

Would I do it? NO, sending current to ground too fast could damage something. Should it hurt anything? NO, I would think not and that would be basically engineered into the circuitry. If you wanted to get rid of all stored power from battery powered system. Pull the cables and let the capacitors bleed in their own time.

This will not reset devises with lithium batteries powering them or any non volatile memory.

IMHO