Quote:
Originally Posted by tasdrouille
If it's a software problem, why are they recalling only the cars with the CTS pedals?
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I spent 30 years working on cars as they became more and more complicated.
It finally got to the point where diagnosis became the major part of the bill and repair became a much smaller percentage of the time.
Some customers would say, " I don't want to spend a lot of money on hit and miss guessing trying to solve the problem, and I don't believe it should take 20replaced parts to fix it either."
In most cases they were right, and I saw a lot of nightmares where other shops had done all kinds of preventative maintenance, but when it came to actually FIXING the problem they didn't have a clue.
My good friend and lunch buddy's father owns their body shop, and they rebuild salvage cars. They had a Focus that would stall on cold starts repeatedly. They took it to two different dealers and neither one could fix the car.
He was going to take this car he had rebuilt and park it in the back lot and tear it apart for parts to other cars, after spending a lot of time rebuilding it.
I said "Not on my watch" and spent 14 hours figuring out it was the fuel pressure sensor. All the factory service bulletins said replace the fuel pump, fuel pump module, clean all the wiring harness grounds, etc, etc.
Two Ford dealers couldn't fix it and spent $600 guessing. I went to a Ford dealer and got every relevant TSB on the car.
When I stopped trying to let everyone else tell me how to fix it and started thinking with my old mechanics brain, I just got lucky and guessed right. They had a parts car out back that ran fine but was too smashed up to rebuild. Pulled the part off and replaced it in 5 minutes.
I applaud every single one of you younger folks who grew up in the age of computers and are more comfortable with them than I feel I am. I may be wrong but it seems to me as the systems get more complicated the potential for chain reactions of more than one defect can really be a nightmare to actually figure out completely.
We used to kid around with our customers talking about replacing fictional parts that did not exist on their cars, all in good humor and not trying to scare them for more than a few seconds. One of my friends who worked for a Chrysler dealership told me their was 13 electronic control units on a Chrysler minivan. I can't imagine how much of a diagnostic nightmare that can be when someone goes in to that system and starts butchering wires to do some dumb mod and creates a nightmare that defies any logical diagnostic process.
I had a customer once come in my shop. He told me he drove 600 miles and his car started running rich loaded up and stalled. After a while he got it restarted and it ran fine after that.
Of course there was no way to diagnose the problem, since we could not duplicate it. We had several used parts in stock that I thought would cover all the things that could cause it to flood out. I replaced 5 parts and it never stalled for 6 months. After that I started putting his old parts back in on at a time. After another 12 months we finally figured out it was a bad ECU.
That was a 1975 280Z, the first year of fuel injection in that model. Today's cars probably have 10 times the electrical circuits compared to that 35 year old Z car.
I bought a 2006 Corolla new with 6 miles on the odometer. In the 20k miles it took them to actually get the 4 wheels properly aligned, they had to take that brand new car to a frame shop and bend the rear axle mounting holes in the uni body to get the alignment right. Got a new set of tires gratis from Toyota at 20,000 miles. I have heard of several other people having alignment problems with that same platform, also in new cars.
"Sorry sir we can not duplicate your problem, so we are unable to fix your car".
Probably that phrase is getting more common every day.
For everyone who tries to blame the vehicle operator, I have a scenario for you. The baby just puked on himself and is choking in the car seat in the back. At that same instant your car decides to take off, on a winding road in the mountains with no room for error. As you try to regain control, you swerve into the oncoming lane of traffic in a blind hairpin curve and you hit another car and it flies over the guard rail and falls down an 800 foot almost vertical drop, killing all 4 people who are in the car. I think there is one person in prison today who is now appealing his conviction due to the Toyota acceleration issue.
It may be years before we finally know what is really happening.
regards
Mech