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Topic
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I want to start a discussion on misdiagnosis. By misdiagnosis I mean situations where your car has been worked on to repair a fault and the same fault still exists after the repair is made.
If possible I want to hear the following
-The type of repair centre eg Manufacturer’s dealer, local garage, specialist or even yourself!
-Who paid for the mistake?
-How long was your car out of action?
-Is it fixed now?
-Who do you think is to blame?
-What was the symptom and make of car?
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Replies
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I had a new Cavalier go into the shop several times because it was eating O2 sensors. They just kept replacing them. As soon as it was out of warranty (by a few months) i had to take it back in for the CEL again and they finally diagnosed it as a bad headgasket…so it was coolant that was contaminating the sensors all along.
The dealer stepped up and got GM to do a goodwill fix rather than stick me with the bill – proof that not all dealers are bad. On top of that when they got it all back together the fuel pump quit while in their possession. They took care of that too. No more problems for the rest of the time we owned it.
98 BMW 740IL loosing coolant. A common problem with this car is the gasket failure in the center of the engine block. A family member found some coolant flowing out from engine center and looked up BMW TIS to validate that the gasket failure would cause this. We removed the belt, remove the fuel injectors, removed the water pump which runs small metal pipe on top of the V, then finally remove the cover and the gasket – which was in perfect shape. Took 13 hours to put everything back to the original condition and the car was still losing coolant afterward. Couple of days later we found a small hole on heater core hose – it will only shoot out coolant on top of the engine block when hot (thermostat opens).
2005 Hyundai something-or-other (they all look the same to me).
Customer comes in complaining that it runs real bad and won’t get out of it’s own way. Our master tech is currently swamped with work, and as I’m the second most experience tech there, the job falls to me. I limp the car inside my bay, and sure enough it’s acting like it’s running on maybe 2 cylinders out of the 6 that it’s got. The check engine light is flashing, which tells me that it’s got something catastrophic going on inside the engine. I hook the scanner to it and see that it’s got a P0300 (misfire, random cylinder), a P0301, P0302, P0303, P0304, P0305, P0306, P1234 and a P2135. Since the scan-tool I was using doesn’t speak Korean, I don’t know what those last two codes mean, but the P030x codes are all misfires on their respective cylinders. I figure that it may be time for spark plugs, since it’s got better than 90k miles, or possibly some other issue. I open the hood and remove the big cover on top of the engine and see a whole bunch of new parts. It’s got 6 fresh injectors, the timing cover has a sticker on it saying that the T-belt was replaced earlier that week, the air filter is brand new… There’s no obvious reason why the car should be running the way it’s running, until I notice a silver sticker on the driver-side strut tower. An induction service was done roughly 15 miles ago, so as a test I clear the codes out of the computer and start the car. Problem solved.
Some other shop charged the customer tons of money for stuff that the car possibly didn’t need, to cure a problem that was effectively all in the car’s mind. Something I learned about Hyundais, and Kias for that matter, is they they all have the automotive equivalent of hypochondria, where as soon as it detects a problem, it will behave as if it has that problem until someone tells it that it doesn’t have that problem any more. Induction services tend to cause misfire codes to appear while the engine is blowing out the carbon build-up and the cleaning agent that it just ingested through vacuum line. If you don’t clear those codes on most cars, it’ll just have a lit CEL, but the car will run fine. On a Korean car, however, if it’s got a misfire code in the system, the engine will run with a misfire, regardless of if there is anything other than the code causing the dead miss.
About a year ago I had a late model Malibu with the 2.4 Eco tec come in with water in the oil. I was covered up so I called head gasket and sold the job with out doing a leak down test, shame on me. When I pulled the deck off I found a crack in the cylinder wall on #1. Oh crap! Now I have to call the customer back and sell and engine! Moral of he story? Always, 100% of the time, do the work!
Local shop in the neighborhood.
I was the one who paid for the mistake and tried getting my money back but the guy wouldn’t refund me. So I never went back.
My car wasn’t out of action as it was only an A/C repair.
The A/C works now and has never stopped working since the repair.
I blame the shop owner for misdiagnosing the problem.
It was a 2005 VW Touareg 4.2L. It was blowing warm/hot air instead of cold air. I took it to another shop after I got ripped off at the first one and they had it fixed in an hour and a half. The first shop charged me $130 to do a complete evacuation of the system and recharge it. That wasn’t the problem. Unfortunately this was about 3 years ago, so I really don’t remember what the actual problem was. Maybe it was electrical or something because A/C compressor was working and going on.I have a 2003 Cavalier that I just bought from a dealership. They replaced the front brake pads and resurfaced the rotors. After 5000 miles later the I felt the steering wheel shaking before a complete stop. I took it back to the dealership and they said the rotors were warped. They replaced them for free and no more problems. I talked to the person that makes appointments, which he is master certified and said the resurface them to save money. He said they are suppose to replace them instead of resurfacing them. I told him that is why I am here, and he just smiled.
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