The Tune Up - An Old Fashioned Job!
Remember back in the olden days, like the 1970’s, when our parents drove those awful old Ford Country Squire station wagons? You know the ones, with the fake wood paneling on the sides, the saggy springs in the front, and the gas tanks that were stuffed up inside the rear fender well and forever rotted out from the bottom.
Those cars, like every other on the road, required regular motor tune ups; twice a year, was the recommended interval in fact. The mechanic, because he wasn’t a technician in those days, replaced spark plugs, ignition points and condensor, adjusted the ignition timing and the carburetor and sent you on your way.
Over time the words ‘tune-up’ became lingo for ‘my car doesn’t run right, that’s what will fix it”. And most of the time it did. Ignition points were a great invention for 1902 but 80 years later they were the root of most driveability and starting problems.
However, in the early 1980’s the first generation of car computers was upon us and the repair shop owners of the world had to begin a massive re-education process that still carries on today.
I’m sorry everyone, but regardless of what we were taught by our Dads as kids, there is no such thing as a tune up anymore.
There are two things you can do to a modern engine, an Emissions Service, or a Driveability Repair. The two are totally different, and the shop owner has a responsibility to the customer to make sure he or she understands the difference.
An emission service is the closest thing to the old tune up; it deals with the parts you have heard of before, spark plugs, air and fuel filters, PCV, and perhaps a distributor cap and rotor if your vehicle still has those old fashioned parts on it. It is important to change these parts, but on a much less frequent basis than before, and primarily to ensure lower emissions at AirCare time. It is however, very seldom anymore that they are the cause of your car running poorly.
Cars today most often run poorly because one of the many sensors feeding information to your main computer is defective or operating out of range. The repair requires scanning the computer’s Engine Management System, determining the problem and taking the correct steps to repair it.
We’ll have more articles later on car computers, but suffice to say that this diagnostic process is not a ten minute job, and there is no way to determine in advance what the repair will cost.
So now we have a situation where your car is running poorly, the customer is phoning around for the cheapest priced tune up to fix it and we are headed onto a collision course of miscommunication.
And the banter back and forth is predictable:
“How much will it cost at your shop”
“I don’t know what the problem is, Sir”
“How come the other shop charges $59.95 for a tune up and you won’t give me a price??”
And on it goes, but a good service advisor is obligated to have this discussion every time in order to ensure the customer understands that replacing his spark plugs and a few filters is not going to fix his car.
The other thing the customer must understand is there is no finite time frame on driveabilty repair either. A tune up will take X amount of time, removing half your dash and tracing a bad ground can take days.
The longest we ever kept a customer’s car was 6 weeks. In the mid 1980’s when we were still learning about car computers, we had a Pontiac Fiero that ran like a bag of dirt. In the end the problem was the one thing we were taught back then that would never give trouble, the DNA of your Engine Management System, the Computer PROM chip.
It was a great outcome because we had a great customer, he gave us the time we needed to fix his car, he didn’t tell us we were dumb, didn’t threaten to take his car away because it wasn’t fixed yet, and was so happy to get it back running better than ever.
Obviously he didn’t pay shop rate for that repair, we had enough hours in it to take his house, but it was a great learning experience at the time for our shop.
And then there is the matter of cost. Nobody likes to pay but consider this for a moment. Your 1972 ford required an oil change every thousand miles , two tune ups per year, two coolant flushes, one in the spring and one in the fall, and you were lucky to get 5 years out of your factory exhaust system and at 30,000 miles your tires were worn out.
Your car today runs badly, but you’ve put 160,000 K on it in 4 years and all you have done is change the oil a few times, so don’t be shocked by a bill for several hundred dollars to make it ship shape again.
Cars have never been as reliable and as cheap to operate as they are right at this exact minute in time.
And if people would only learn to maintain them, as in spend some money on them before they break, they would even be cheaper in the long run.
But that’s for another day ———– go and wash your car!