Intermittent Problems That Can't Be Fixed

I receive a surprising number of messages from motorists who are unhappy with dealer service departments.  Who can repair my BMW right?  Where do I find a competent shop to work on Mercedes?  Who repairs Land Rovers?  One of the biggest sources of distress comes from intermittent problems with certified used cars that are out of new car warranty, but still covered by certified warranty.  This recent missive typifies what I hear:

For the past few months I've had both the check engine light and tire pressure monitoring system warning lights come on and off.   I check the gas cap and the engine runs fine.  My tires pressures seem ok, too.  I've taken my Mercedes to a dealer three times for these warning lights, and every time they've returned the vehicle saying it's fixed. After driving the car again for a few hours, or a day, the lights come back on. The dealer said that as long as the check engine light is not flashing, it's not a critical problem.   I'm just tired of dealing with this dealer's service department.

Why does this happen?  Is the dealer incompetent, or the problem so intractable?  In most cases, the answer is neither.  Much of the time, the answer can be boiled down to four words:

No pay = no work.

To explain what this means in the context of car repair I need to start by explaining some things about warranty and service.   When a car is new, it is backed by a warranty from the manufacturer.  With rare exceptions, there is no limit to that warranty, and the dealer is not responsible except as the service agent.  The manufacturer cannot say, “we’ve done all the warranty repair we are going to do,” and abandon you.

If a new car has a really intractable problem the manufacturer will usually offer a replacement vehicle or in some cases a refund or lease cancellation.  Carmakers go to great lengths to satisfy customers.

They also expect a lot of their dealers.  One thing they expect is that the dealer will do something in response to customer complaints.  If a car comes in with an intermittent fault the dealer will often change the most likely parts even if the fault is not present at that moment, because that gives the best chance of cure, and the manufacturer stands behind them and pays the bill.  If a subsequent repair is needed, they generally stand behind that too.

If a lot of time is needed to diagnose a difficult problem the manufacturers have a policy of paying the technician as needed.  Knowing that, they usually get the job done.  Problems can still happen but the vast majority of new cars get fixed successfully.

Cars covered by certified programs are a whole different story.  Once the new car warranty expires the manufacturers unlimited obligation comes to an end.  The certified program is often administered by a third party company who didn’t make the car and has strict limits on their responsibility for it.

In most cases, there is no longer provision for paying to diagnose difficult problems.  Indeed, many used car warranties – technically called service contracts because they are not actual manufacturer warranties – don’t pay for diagnosis at all.  Those that do often pay a fraction of the real time taken.

Yet customers don’t know the difference. They just expect their problems to be solved.  But that can’t happen when no one is willing to spend money to find a problem.  It’s not the dealer’s car – so he’s not writing a blank check if the trouble can’t be found in 15 minutes.  The car’s owner thinks warranty covers everything and the dealer must be trying to cheat him if they ask for any money.  The result – the dealer says “no problem was found” and boots the car out the door. One day, they figure, it will come back with a visible failure and they can fix it then. 

The focus of carmakers is to make money by keeping customers happy so they buy more cars.  Good service on new cars is part of that.  The dynamic for a third party administrator is totally different.  They make money from finance, by collecting fees for service contracts and paying out as little as possible.   

Once those folks manage the car’s service, everything changes.

Yet the motoring public knows nothing of this.  Everyone tries to hide this ugly truth.  Many dealers are told they cannot charge customers extra for so-called certified repairs.  That is presumably meant to prevent gouging, but in practice it ensures no dealer technician will waste a single unpaid minute chasing a difficult intermittent problem. 

The system works for most people, most of the time, because most problems are not intermittent and motorists learn to ignore the rest.

For the rest of you . . . .

We’re here in Springfield, Massachusetts, and we’ll diagnose and fix anything at our regular shop rate.  If an extended warranty pays us, great.  If not, the owner can pay.  From the shop perspective that’s the only fair way to do this.  We get our clients everything we can from their service contracts and they pay the balance.  We charge for actual time worked, and WE WILL solve the problem. 

J E Robison Service Co, Inc

Springfield, MA, USA

Bosch Authorized Car Service

Specialists in Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes, Porsche, Land Rover, and Rolls Royce-Bentley

When cars break, and break again

My friend Bob called me to ask about his most recent car repair experience.  He said, Last week I noticed my brake fluid was low, and the pedal went to the floor.  I took it to the shop, and they replaced a leaking caliper.   Two weeks later, the same thing happened.  This time they say I need a master cylinder?  How come? 

The experience of sequential repairs is all too common in the automobile business.  Sometimes it’s due to technician error.  But more often, it’s the inevitable result of service policies or the step by step nature of some repair operations.  Let’s look at some examples to see how it happens.

When Bob brought his car in for service the first time, he had a visible problem.  Brake fluid was leaking at one of the wheels and it’s didn’t take much to see the source was a failed caliper.  Replacement was a straightforward job and the garage sent the car on its way assuming it was fixed for good.

Yet it failed again, just a few weeks later.  This time the failure was not so obvious.  There were no leaks at any of the wheels but the fluid was low.  When that happens there is only one place to look in most cars – the power brake booster.  Indeed, when the master cylinder was pulled back from the booster the technician could see where fluid was leaking and he ordered a new cylinder.

The question is, why did this happen two weeks after the first repair?

The answer was clear with a little bit of thought.  When everything is normal the guts of the master cylinder don’t move more than a few thousandths of an inch to actuate the brakes.  When the system gets bled following repair it moves through a much bigger range, half an inch or more.  If the seldom-used reaches of the master cylinder have become roughened by corrosion the act of bleeding the brakes may lead to the internal seals failing.

That’s what happened in Bob’s case.  I asked myself how the repeat failure might have been avoided.  The first answer that came to mind is more frequent brake fluid flushes.  When the fluid is flushed the cylinders are run through their full travel.  Doing that periodically would prevent buildup of corrosion and presumably prevent failures like this.  But at what cost?  The more flushes would have cost more than the cylinder, and required three service visits instead of the one repair.

Some would say the brakes could be bled through air pressure, without moving the pedal.  That’s possible on some vehicles but the problem with that is that you never see the system work through its whole range and that may blind you to another more serious problem.  So that may work, or it may replace a harmless problem like this with a worse one.

In the end I concluded there is no way to assure a “one step fix” in a situation like this.  Most of the time, when the first job was done, the master cylinder would not fail.  But every now and then, it will.  When that happens you have a two step repair.

Then there are the so-called emission problems – those “check engine” lights that just won’t go away.  Many motorists believe that scan tools point us directly to failed parts, but all too often that is not the case.  Fault codes are symptoms, many of which have numerous possible causes.  Sometimes we can test and verify a failed part and we have a simple one-visit repair.  Other times the tests all come back good – the problem is intermittent or not picked up by our testers.  Other times we reach a point in the diagnostic tree that says “Replace A and re-evaluate.”  So we replace A and see what happens next.

The problem is, low level emission faults cannot usually be detected on a short drive.  Many require that the car be run through a tank of gas, sometimes more.  As a practical matter that makes the owner the test driver – and if more work is needed, the car comes back.  Sometimes twice, sometimes three times.

I wish there was a way to streamline this, but with the ever-increasing complexity of cars, we face a choice between exchange of major systems where we swap out all the possibilities (prohibitively expensive) or multiple repair efforts (a hassle for motorists). 

Winter and Waxoyl

Winter is coming and it's time to think about protection for anything you plan to drive in the snow and salt.  Robison Service is the most experienced installer of Waxoyl corrosion protection products in the East.

Waxoyl treatments start at $1,000 and we're still booking appointments for fall.  Read more on the Robison Service website, email mwhite@robisonservice.com or call Maribeth White at 413-785-1665 for an appointment

Hurricanes, Seawater and Cars - a bad combination

If you’ve been watching the news these past few days you’ve probably seen plenty of images of waterlogged cars.  New York City alone has thousands of flooded vehicles.  Some were immersed to the tops of the tires, while others were totally underwater.  What will happen to them?  All are junk; useful for scrap metal and body panels only.  But that’s not where many will end up . . .

Most of the cars will be covered by insurance, and they will be written off and sold as salvage.  For months to come, salvage auctions all over the East Coast will be processing these cars.  Some will look perfect, but they aren’t.  There’s a reason they were declared scrap.  If only they ended up that way.  The fact that they don’t is one of the dirty little secrets of the insurance business.

When an insurance company declares a vehicle a total loss, they are in essence buying the car from the owner at its pre-loss value.  But insurance companies are not in the business of fixing cars; they are in the business of money.  Therefore their goal is to turn that piece of totaled iron into cash in the most efficient way possible.

That’s where salvage auctions come in. Insurance companies hire these auctions to gather the wrecked, burnt, and flooded cars from individuals wherever they may be.  They then clean them up – if such a thing is possible – and auction them to the highest bidder.

Bidders at these salvage sales are supposed to be recyclers – junkyards, to use the more traditional term.  However, many buyers of flood cars are shady used car operations.  These people don’t buy the salvage for parts. They buy them to fix it up and sell – often to some unsuspecting used car buyer.

Insurance companies could stop this practice in a moment, if they wanted.  They could require flood cars to be cut up for scrap, and they could ban sales to so-called “rebuilders.”  Why don’t they do that?  Money.  A buyer of scrap might pay $10,000 for a flooded Porsche, because that’s the value of the salable parts.  But another bidder might pay $15,000 knowing he can sell the car to some unsuspecting motorist while it still drives.

From my perspective, it looks like that want the top bid – which probably comes from a “rebuilder” – more than they want these ruined cars off the road.

Why are they ruined, you ask?  How can a car be ruined while it still looks brand new, especially if it drives like new, too?  Here’s how it happens . . .

The first thing to fail is the electrical system. Most modern cars have wire harnesses running under the carpet – on the floor – and many have control modules down there too.  If seawater rises above the door sills these areas will be submerged.  When that happens, salt water invades the wiring, control units and electrical connectors and begins the invisible process of corrosion that ends up like the rusty junk you see, washed up on beaches.

Once it starts, there’s no turning back this process.  The only cure would be to strip out all the wiring and controllers and install new parts – a task that might cost $10,000 on an ordinary Toyota or Chevrolet, and that’s just the beginning . . .

When seats and upholstery are submerged their cushions and innards become waterlogged.  They can’t dry because the water is sealed inside by impermeable vinyl and leather coverings.  So the water stays in their, growing mold and rotting the interior from within.  It’s not a very pretty picture, when you cut it apart six months later.  Once again, it could be fixed, but the cost to take apart every bit of interior and wring it dry would be prohibitive and destructive, because most of thise pieces were never meant to be disassembled.

Then we come to the running gear.  Modern cars were not designed to operate in water.  Seals and gaskets keep oil and grease from escaping outward often can’t prevent seawater from making its way inward.  When salt water gets inside it ruins the oil, and begins the familiar process of corrosion whenever it comes in contact with bare steel. 

Seawater damage to wheel bearings and axles may be insidious – the bearings may fail one by one, over a period of years.  But fail they will.  The ocean will always win.  The Army learned this when they started driving truck up beaches – today, they strip and overhaul any axle assembly that’s been in salt water for this very reason.  You can do that in an ordinary car, too, but the cost will be high and it’s one more reason cars get scrapped.

The same thing happens in a engine.  If the engine is running when submerged it usually dies a violent death as incompressible water is sucked into the cylinders, shattering or bending the pistons and rods.  If the engine is off, the damage may not be as apparent, but the corrosion will begin inside, and the engine will fail long before its time.  This will happen even if the oil is changed.

Insurance companies know these things.  That’s why they declare flood cars to be total losses.  But to some dealers, they look too good to scrap, and there’s money to be made. 

These people will buy flood cars, change fluids, change failed control units, and get the vehicles running as best they can.  Then they offer them for sale, usually far below book value.  The cars often have salvage titles, which tell buyers the cars are reconstructed, but buyers look at the cars and tell themselves all is well, because they look so good.  Wrong!  A saltwater flood car will never stop presenting problems; it was written off originally for a very good reason.

A true repair of a saltwater flood car would consist of new wiring and control units, dried out or new upholstery, and completely overhauled or new drivetrain and running gear.   The cost of that work will far exceed the value of any ordinary car.

The take-away from all this:  Be very careful if you’re in the market for a used car in the next six months.  Steer clear of anything with a salvage title, no matter how god it looks.  If a car has a clear title, look at where it’s from. If it lived in an area impacted by Sandy – be very careful. 

Storing newer collector cars for winter

If you live in snow country you know convertible and sports car season is coming to an end.  Soon it will be time to put our pets away till next year.  In this article I’d like to offer some pointers for storing late model collector cars.

Start by filling your car with fuel and pouring in the correct amount of fuel stabilizer.  I suggest Sta-Bil brand but alternatives are available.  A full gas tank minimizes the chance of condensation which happens when water vapor from the air condenses on the inside of the gas tank as temps drop in the evening.  If this happens every day in a car that’s in storage you can accumulate a great deal of water in the fuel.  Filling the tank to the top will prevent it.

I also suggest pouring in a bottle of octane booster as the fuel will lose octane rating the longer it is stored.

Note:  cars built after the 1990s have sealed fuel tanks which should not allow free circulation of vapors.  For these cars filling the tank is less important and indeed you may want to keep their fuel level low so you can fill with fresh gas in the spring.

Run the car at least 30 minutes to get it thoroughly warmed up; an hour’s hard run is better.   You want to make sure you have boiled any stray moisture out of the engine and exhaust system before shutting the car off for the season.

You want to store the car with reasonably clean oil; some suggest changing oil right before winter storage while others argue for changing the oil first thing in the spring.  In my opinion, the oil in your collector car should always be fairly clean so that no special attention is required for storage.  As a practical matter, I can say with confidence that cars often go into the shop to be "checked over for spring" where shop visits to "prep for winter" are fairly uncommon.

If you don't know the age of your coolant I suggest you either change it (most cars should get fresh coolant at 2-5 years intervals) or at least tests its ph to make sure it has not become corrosive.

The next step is washing your car, and vacuuming and cleaning the interior and trunk.  Spots that wash off easily now may not be so removable if left till next spring!  If your car is going to be stored in an area where mice may invade I suggest putting mothballs or some other repellant in the car to improve the chances that they won’t move in.

Check all your fluids and top them off right to the full lines before parking the car.  Make sure the antifreeze protection is good and the windshield washer system has solvent, not water, so that it does not freeze.

Spray all the door seals and the trunk seal with silicone spray before putting the car away.  Oil the hood, door, and trunk hinges, too.  If there are throttle linkage pieces on the engine I’d hit them with oil, and I’d also oil any moving pivots (like the parking brake linkage) under the car.

Before parking your car I suggest inflating your tires to the maximum pressures as shown on the tire sidewall.  This will minimize the tendency of your tires to develop flat spots as they sit.

Switch off the radio, heat, air conditioner and all other accessories before you shut the car off.  The will minimize the electrical load and transients when you reconnect power next spring.  It’s your best way to prevent electrical failures.

Drive your car into the spot where it will be stored.  Close the windows, and shut off the engine and remove the key.  If your car was made before the airbag and electronic engine management era you can go ahead and disconnect the battery.  If you have a newer car – wait a minute!   Newer cars often need as much as twenty minutes for their computers to store data and shift to low power mode.  If you disconnect the battery before that process is complete you can set fault codes that will require a trip to the shop to correct next year.

In the worst case, disconnecting the battery can even cause major electronic systems to fail.  Land Rover – for example – has a problem with this on their 2000-2005 Range Rovers.  Disconnecting the battery too quickly can send the navigation computer to never-never land where the only cure is a new $1,000+ unit.  Be patient and avoid problems.

If you are disconnecting the battery I certainly suggest you take the keys out of the vehicle.  The reason – when you connect the battery in the spring there is always a chance the central locking system will power up and lock the vehicle.  If that happens and the keys are inside, you’re stuck!

Modern batteries lose about 10% of their charge every month while sitting.  If you park the car at the beginning of November a good battery will still have enough juice to start the car in March.  Connecting a trickle charger will keep it at 100% buy you’ll need access to an electrical outlet.

The best way to protect your tires is to put wood blocks under the suspension at all four corners, lifting the car’s wheels slightly off the ground.  That will ensure the tires are round next season.

Do not set the parking brake.  Leaving the parking brake under tension all winter may well result in a brake that won’t release next spring. 

If you have a convertible you should usually store the car with the top up to prevent shrinkage.  Once it's closed don't open it until you have a warm day to heat the canvas unless you are in a heated space in which case that does not matter.  Every year we see plastic rear windows that split when opened on a cold day.

Some people prefer car covers; others leave their pets uncovered.  There’s one school of thought that says pulling the cover off and on will scratch the car and another that says the protection is invaluable.  If you want to get a cover and the car is indoors I recommend the heavy flannel.  If it’s outdoors Technalon is the ticket.

These tips will maximize your chances of an uneventful winter of storage.  I wish you the best of luck with executing the plan.  And remember to keep your insurance in force.  If there’s a water leak in the garage, or mice eat holes in the seats . . . those things are covered by comprehensive insurance in most states.  The times you are not driving the car may well be the times you need insurance most.

John E Robison

J E Robison Service

Springfield, MA, USA

www.robisonservice.com