92 Camry Question

17 years ago

I've been posting about my car on here for a couple of years & everyone is so helpful so please someone help now....

Dec. 18 get my camry inspected at Dealership who has been servicing my car for years. Pass inspection but let them talk me into getting a throttle cleaning (which I thought was fine because it was running rough). Left the 19th for vacation & returned the 31st (not in the camry). On the 31st I start it and it didn't sound right so I left it run for about 5 minutes and off I went. Stopped at a store and when starting the car again it cranked but wouldn't start. AAA took it to dealership and they told me it wasn't firing and replaced wires, spark plugs, dist. cap, etc. for 500.00. Drive it home & next morning same thing...cranks but won't start...to make a long story short after some long bickering they agreed to tow it at their expense and look at it. They have had it since and call me everyday to tell me it is starting fine. It has 91,000 miles on it and up until they did the throttle job the car was fine. I really trust this place as they never ripped me off before but they want me to pick it up tomorrow as they feel its an intermittent problem that they can't detect.

(the tow truck guy tried to start it before loading it and said whoa that sounds horrible...something is wrong).

I told them today to check the fuel filter....any suggestions??? Please respond if you can ASAP before they make me take it tomorrow. Thanks ...

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Comments (2)

chad_said
17 years ago
Wow, where to start?

Why would anyone in their right mind be taking a 17 year old car to the dealer? Any repair there is likely to cost 2-3 times as much as the same work done at a good independant shop. Dealers today survive by upselling unnecessary services like the one you got talked into. These are commonly known as "wallet flushes" in the business.
Your experience is typical of dealer service departments these days though. Thanks to the flat rate pay system and the manufacturers continually cutting labor times, most real techs with the ability to fix things have been driven out of the dealer (or out of the auto business, in many cases) and into the aftermarket. What's left are "flush kings", fresh from the pit at Jiffy Lube and new graduates from big box schools like WyoTech and similar. The lack of experience, combined with the dealer philosophy of replace rather than repair, results in these "techs" not knowing how to diagnose anything beyond a readout on an OBD2 scanner. The days of the dealer service department being run by a knowledgeable former technician are long gone; now car salesmen/management types run things and all they care about is the bottom line. The service managers favorite tech is not the highly skilled one with no comebacks, but rather the one who books a lot of hours and makes the most profit doing the easy gravy work. If replacing parts listed in a troubleshooting chart doesn't fix the problem, they're generally lost.

You need to find a good independant shop to service the car from now on. Build a long term relationship with a real tech, then you won't be at the mercy of whatever flush machine weilding kid is working in the dealer's shop this month.
john_g
17 years ago
Random problems that can cause a no-start can be a real PITA. They can ONLY be diagnosed while the problem is actually happening. In all likelihood, there is only one possible correlation to the initial service, and its a significant stretch to make that call. If the Idle Air Control motor is sticking, and nor opening wide enough for the cold start the engine could flood. That easily could result in the diagnosis for the spark plus, and you really cannot do them without the rest of the secondary ignition parts.

All you can really do at this point is pick the car back up. What I do for my customers is make myself available so that the next time that it happens, IF they are close enough, I go to the car and begin the diagnostics right there where the car is. Hopefully even if I can't complete the routine, I can definitely narrow down the problem as much as possible.

Question. When this is hard to start, do you begin to touch the throttle and try and help it fire up? An issue with the idle air control could be worked around by doing just that. As a tech, I first know to do this, and usually react naturally with that step and start the car, occasionally wondering if this is the actual vehicle problem that has caused the repair visit. That potentially could explain why it starts all the time for them, but don't jump to conclusions here. That's only one possibility among many. The tune up work as done, very likely was maintenance that had been overdue, but not the cause of the no-start. At the same time, there is no way to know if they weren't right on with the diagnosis at that exact moment, and cars doing what they do, the thing has simply developed another issue. Timing of the failure aside, there is more than a good chance, the shop has performed exactly the way they should have, and actually may have done nothing wrong.
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92 Camry Question

Comments (2)

chad_said

john_g

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