[Shop-talk] Parts annoyance

[David Scheidt]

> On May 3, 2021, at 15:00, Pat Horne <patintexas at icloud.com> wrote:
>
> All the electronics that is going into vehicles is hard to deal with troubleshooting even with factory equipment. We need to more thoroughly train mechanics in these areas, & fast!
>
> A friend of mine has a (I think) out of warranty 2017 F150 that works in fine except the radiator fan would always run @ full speed. The dealer couldn’t figure out what the problem was after 3 days so she bought a new truck so she wouldn’t have to listen to it. She was told that there were 27 computers in the truck & if any of them was bad it could cause odd problems not related to what that computer controlled.

I hope she made it clear to the dealer why she was trading it in on a
Chevy. That's a bull answer, from someone who is either incompotent, a
fraud, or lazy.  (or all three, they do work for a dealer....) and the
sort of thing that gives dealers a bad name.  I'd have called the
regional service manager, and politely asked why their dealer says a
four year old truck is unfixable.

> Glad you could troubleshoot the problem rather than shotgunning it as a lot of technicians would do.
>

The bus had already had $10K in parts cannon shot at.

To be fair to the shops, a lot of that was stuff it needed, it does
have 450k on the clock, is a 6.0 powerstroke[1], and was home to a
large number of mice.  But I’m pretty sure there was $1 or $2k  in
labor to fail to find the battery drain problem, and I think some of
the stuff one of the shops did was unnecessary.

[1] what an amazing lump of crap.  Putting it in an econoline chassis
is even stupider, the heat kills everything, and it's impossible to
work on it.