Charging dead battery on Ford E350

I’m not a battery expert but I would not be comfortable going camping with a battery that had gone that dead. Buy a new battery and put it on a maintainer when leaving it parked for anything more than a week. Same for any late model vehicle; the Toyota mechanic warned us not to leave our year old Highlander parked at an airport for 2 weeks. It has a parasytic current draw of half an amp due to Toyota’s failure to use nonvolatile memory in the computer added to radios powered up to react to signals from the remote, current to keep the doors locked, clock, etc. I happened to notice that turning the headlight setting from auto to off reduced the current to a quarter of an amp - maybe the computer needed to be wider awake to decide of it was daylight or dark. I tried my best to inform the dealership but there was little interest in my discovery or my having to charge the battery several times a week all winter.

I have no problem with simply disconnecting the battery in our 2004 E350 for the winter. I’ve read that there may be consequences to disconnecting batteries in late model vehicles because they forget the aging of pollution sensors (EGR and oxygen) and they may have to be replaced so the computer can relearn their state from new. If so, a serious error has been made in design.