Summer season is here
With the weather getting warmer we are starting to see more cars with A/C issues. Here is a Peugeot RCZ […]
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Into our workshop was this Renault with heaterblower trouble. Access to the motor is terrible on these cars. With the glove box and heater ducting on the passenger side removed and the full steering column removed on the drivers side you can see the motor
Although you can see the motor you still can’t get at the wiring. For that you need a special tool to twist and unlock the motor and small hands to get inside the ducting and release the plug onto the motor.
A tough job that we are experienced at here at Widnes Auto Electrical.
The Grand Tour: Jeremy Clarkson’s first show since Top Gear praised:
The Grand tour – We all know Jeremy Clarkson’s name from Top Gear. Since he left BBC and the show, followed by Richard Hammond and James May, The Grand Tour will be he’s first programme, also with the presence of the last two. This new show was launched on Amazon Prime streaming service and it’s been said that is basically “Top Gear with a boost”, since there are more means, financially speaking. The cost of production, the scale of the programme and even the technical support is bigger than he had before and that can be noticed in the quality of the first episode already aired.
What people are saying is that this new show tastes really like Clarkson and his mates, what means that Top Gear fans will be happy. But while The Grand Tour is being reviewed so well around the globe, the BBC attempt to revive Top Gear is not. These are good news to Clarkson, Hammond and May. We can already expect three seasons, throughout three years of twelve episodes each. One episode will approximately have an hour and they will be freed one per week.
Some say they should be shorter a bit, but throughout Twitter you can mainly see good critics from the fans, even though Amazon does not release the viewing numbers to tell for sure if the pilot was a success. From my point of view, the programme will be fine if they keep the quality as good as this first episode. It’s funny, it talks about cars, it shows you around the globe (in the pilot we can see the desert of California, United States, and then Algarve, Portugal, for example), it has all the things it needs to be a success. The only thing missing is the celebrity driving car to see how fast it can go and the score board to tells us who is the best. Apart from that, there’s nothing missing. Probably, it has more than he had in Top Gear.
The vehicle was brought in with no Blower. We stripped the dashboard to gain access to the motor and control module
The motor was found to be open circuit which would normally mean a new unit. But hear at Widnes Auto Electrical we are experts at repairing electrical motors for various applications.
The motor was stripped and repaired saving the customer over £175 against a replacement unit.
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This Mercedes came in for an electric roof conversion. Normally you would have to sit in the car and hold the roof switch till the roof cycle was complete. With this conversion the process becomes one touch from the keyfob.
Once fitted you can download and adjust settings,even allow the roof to open whilst the car is moving!
Recovered to us not running. Cars like this can be hard to work on because information and diagrams are scarce, but with our experience and proven test process we can be confident in tackling these sorts of jobs.
Customer said they pushed the internal button for central locking and car cut out. Vehicle started but wouldn’t change gear as it’s automatic.
It was found that fuse 38 listed for central locking and mirrors was blowing as soon as ignition was switched on .
Using specialist equipment we can trace the source of the short in the most efficient way.
Disconnecting all doors made no difference. Then disconnecting the relevant loom narrowed it down to the engine bay. More testing confirmed that the problem lay within the fusebox/body control module itself.
A new part was priced at over £500,but we were confident in our diagnosis to tell the customer of our findings. Luckily we managed to source a 2nd hand unit. Once plugged in and all the fault codes cleared and various systems reset, the car started first time and ran great.
ABS light on . A quick look at fault codes reveals pump fault . A wiring diagram was used to check power and ground connections . All proved ok .
The pump was removed and a 2nd hand unit sourced as new unit expensive and a repair on existing unit would take too long.
The pump was coded in and test driven to confirm fix.
Into our workshop was this Kia Soul. This is a full electric vehicle and not a hybrid.
The customer wanted a new set of horns fitting. We wired them up completely independent from the existing vehicle wiring so as not to interfere with the sensitive vehicle electronics.
This car came in from another garage who had fitted plugs and coil packs but the fault remained.
The first thing to do was to confirm which cylinder the misfire was on.
With this confirmed we then have to find out whether it’s a fuel, ignition or a fault within the cylinder. The easiest place to start is with the ignition or spark.
A node light is fitted to the plug for the injector to see whether the light pulses with each injector pulse. As this was an intermittent fault at the time of testing it was ok.
We checked fuel pressure and it was also ok. We then put the car back to standard and used our pico scope to monitor the injection pulse whilst the car was running, pico scope is a great way to monitor electrical circuits whilst being non intrusive. The images are all recorded so you can leave the vehicle and if the fault happens whilst your away from the vehicle you can go back and see what happened
Whilst monitoring the injection pulse the signal would dissappear as if being switched off, seen here as a flat line
We then checked the integrity of the wiring from the injector to the ecu just to make sure there were no bad connections or chaffs in the wiring before contacting the customer to tell him that the ecu was at fault. An expensive component which you want to be certain of before swopping. With our experience and training in electrical diagnosis we were confident in telling the customer our results.
This vehicle came in with intermittent heavy steering when turning the steering wheel to the left.
A quick diagnostic code read revealed a problem with the torque sensor. This device is inside the power steering unit.
With the column stripped it was confirmed as faulty and a new unit sourced
Once fitted and test driven, all fault codes cleared and the car drove great.
Dieselgate -Volkswagen vow to fix affected diesels in Europe by 2017, EU claims:
Dieselgate – You probably all know about the “dieselgate” or “emissiongate” scandal that began in September of 2015. It was found that Volkswagen was falsifying the amount of emissions of nitrogen oxides that their cars produced by programming TDI diesel engines to not show the true quantity of those polluting gases.
This situation affected 11 million cars throughout the world, with the majority of them being found in Europe (around 8,5 million vehicles were defective here). Until recent, these European owners did not have a solution for their problems, unlike the nearly half million owners in the US that already knew they were going to be financially compensated for their troubles.
While in US things are getting resolved, only last month, during a meeting, Volkswagen board member Francisco Javier Garcia Sanz told that the company is going to warn, the costumers in Europe that need their car fixed, until the end of this year. Since the beginning of 2016 the company is working on finding a way to fix these cars. The repairs are based in adapting the engines with a “flow transformer” and a software update. However, for now, this will only fix one of the three type of engines that need to be fixed (1.2-, 1.6- and 2.0-liter diesel engines, being the 1.6-liter engine the one who is getting repaired).
Despite all of these efforts that are being unveiled, costumers in Europe aren’t very happy with, what they call, a differentiation treatment between the US and the European clients, since US clients already have a solution that goes through indemnifying them (they have a settlement plan that revolves around 15 billion dollars) and not having to deal with all of the waiting and worrying to get their cars repaired.
Nevertheless, Automotive News Europe, a weekly newspaper, reported that Volkswagen is planning to repair all the cars by the fall of 2017. European Commission claims they are doing all they can to assure that all owns that are affected by this situation are getting a solution, but until now only 10 percent of costumers impacted in Europe got their vehicles fixed. For now, the only thing that the 90 percent of owners that are still waiting for a resolution can do is wait and hope that all of this is going to be mended soon enough so they can continue with their lives.