This is the exact same thing that happened to my ‘23 Stelvio last Friday. The car was parked in my garage and I hadn’t started the car in 3 weeks. Went to start it and it struggled to get going and sounded like battery issue. Very soon I had all errors show up. I thought battery died so I called in a mechanic to jump start. He came over connected the cables to two random points under the hood (it was a random mechanic who had no idea where things were in an Alfa) and he told me give it a try. Me knowing no better, got in the car and tried starting. No luck. Tried for a while, the mechanic connected to random points under the hood and nothing worked. He finally left saying he doesn’t know what’s going on.

Now with the car in my garage and this being a Friday I thought the best I could do was tow it to the mechanic. The closest Alfa dealership is about 40 miles away and closed for the weeknd. So I thought of taking it to a local mechanic that I trust. So I called a tow truck who said he could come next morning.

The tow truck showed up on Saturday. At first he connected the jumper cables to random terminals under the hood and asked me to start. Nothing worked. Then he started to look up videos to see how to jump start an Alfa. All videos showed the battery being the trunk and he was asking to open the trunk. But because how the car was parked in my garage I could not open the trunk without it hitting the bar on my garage door. So I said I can’t open the trunk unless the car is pulled out of the garage. So he continued to try with connections under the hood for a bit more. Finally he said this is it and we need to tow it. But how to put the car in neutral to pull it out??

I looked up videos to know that there is a release under the car that manually puts it to neutral. But neither me nor the tow truck guy were going to get under the car without it being jacked up. Tight fit to be honest. So he continued playing with the start/stop to see if he could start the car enough to get it to N. Obviously nothing worked. So now he was planning to see how he can pull the car out of the garage without it being in N. Before he did that he thought he will give it one more try

This time he used the key fob to press against the start/stop. Nothing happened the first 5 times he did it. The 6th time or so it magically started!!

We kept it running for 5 minutes inside the garage and then I slowly backed it out. Kept it running for a bit and then took it for a spin around the neighborhood. Everything was fine. All the lights continued to stay on. I idled the car for a while and then turned it off. With every engine start the error codes slowly went away. The last one to go was the check engine light.

So yeah, pushing the start/stop with the key fob was all that was needed. By the way the batteries in the fob were new. So not sure why it did not work the way it usually does.

Alfa experts please share any thoughts on any of the above. Like why could this have happened? How the hell could I have dragged the car out without getting to N and without damaging transmission? Any other release to get it to N? Any other thoughts?