Maintenance

Avoid spraying cleaner directly onto the shifter area when cleaning your vehicle -The shifter has electrical and circuit boards inside that can be damaged by liquids. Spray your cleaner onto a rag and then wipe the area. We have seen where customers have spilled a drink onto the shifter and shorted out the circuit board which caused shifting problems.

With todays’ electronic transmissions, intermittent problems are very common and it can be difficult to reproduce the complaint when in the shop. The more information you can give us, the quicker we can duplicate the symptoms and diagnose the problem. “Last year we had a vehicle that the customer advised us that she lost all power while driving at freeway speeds. She was not able to give us much information as she was panicked as she was in heavy traffic and had a hard time getting off the freeway. She had it towed in and we proceeded to drive it over a three day period with no issues. We had talked with the customer several times, on the third day she recalled that it had did something similar a few months previous and both times the vehicle had sat for a few days when it is normally driven every day.

This helped us as we were driving the vehicle every chance we had. We then let the vehicle sit for a day while monitoring the battery voltage, we noticed that the battery voltage was dropping and kept falling below 12 volts. This led us to the problem. The vehicle had actually lost the fly by wire gas pedal and would not respond to her pushing on the gas. It ended up not needing any transmission repairs and a new battery corrected the problem. This is just one of many vehicles we get on a regular basis where the information given to us has helped in getting to the root of the problem quicker.”