327: Strategic Part Replacement
Annotations will appear as you listen
0:00
37:36
LIVE
Welcome to the Automotive Diagnostic Podcast.
We're going to explore ways to sharpen our diagnostic skills, find learning resources, and
hear from experts in the automotive field.
This episode is brought to you by L1 Automotive Training and Keith Perkins.
If you're looking for education on module programming, J2534, eProm work, key and immobilizer,
electrical diagnostics, or drivability diagnostics, Keith has a website L1Training.com that's
got over 60 hours of training videos on all those subjects and more.
When I first started out doing mobile, I utilized Keith's videos on module programming in J2534
in order to get my head wrapped around what I would need for the tooling, the computers,
the software setups, what kind of obstacles I would be up against when I'm out there
programming modules on cars, and it was a huge benefit to me.
And I continue to use the training videos that he has on his website.
So I strongly recommend checking out L1Training.com.
The link is in the show notes.
Hey, what's going on?
Automotive World, welcome to another episode of the Automotive Diagnostic Podcast.
My name is Sean Tipping and I will be your host once again for this week's episode.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Just being on the show this week, I'm going to be talking about something that
I was wrestling with and thinking about this week and other weeks.
I have a specific example from this week, doing mobile diagnostics that I want to throw out there
to everybody.
I think it's been talked about previously on the show in brief segments.
I want to say me and Fonzo had at least somewhat of a discussion about it.
And I mean, some of this thinking comes from conversations I've had with him and I'm
sure other people in the industry have used this framework in diagnostics and testing.
But as I'm growing and learning, running a business and really looking at the numbers
and the end of the week, the end of the month, the end of the year and how our time
is best spent, how much money we're bringing in per hour and per job, all that stuff,
all the creative labor rates, all the boring stuff of being the owner of a business or shop
or a diagnostic company.
This kind of comes front and center, but it really does relate to us as technicians, too,
in the diagnostic path.
So let me lay out what I'm talking about specifically.
This is about parts replacement as a testing method.
Now, obviously, the scanner-danner statement, I have a t-shirt that literally says,
don't be a parts changer.
I own that scanner-danner t-shirt and that was his premise for a lot of his teaching,
is the parts cannon is a disservice to a customer.
It's lazy.
It's not actual diagnostics.
It's deceitful to the customer in a lot of cases when you're just chucking parts
at something in order to fix it, like, oh, I have an oxygen sensor code.
Just put an oxygen sensor in it, right?
Or, oh, this is a weird problem.
It must be the computer, right?
And we get that all the time.
We come in, I would say, probably 40% to 50% of the modules we program did not fix the problem.
And if you talked to other programming companies, I know Keith Perkins has said something similar,
where a ton of modules that get replaced on cars don't fix the problem that the shop was intending to fix.
Now, whether it was improper diagnostics or no diagnostics at all, of course, that all depends on the location.
But that's the whole point that Paul Danner had with all of his material and teachings,
is like, hey, let's actually do some tests and figure out what's wrong.
And, I mean, that's near and dear to my heart as well.
Starting the business and getting into diagnostics is like,
we can figure this stuff out with some testing methods, right?
We can prove out components.
We can diagnose what's going on in the circuit.
We can, you know, measure things and test things and say, yes, that is the problem for sure.
And most of the time, that's true, especially if it's a hard fault.
I would say almost all the time, there are definite exceptions,
but almost all the time, you can get zeroed in on a specific component or a part or a wire
and say, yep, that is going to fix it if you do this.
And sometimes you can even, you know, bypass said component or part and then prove it that, like,
look, it's fixed if I do this.
So you guys just have to replace this component.
And most of the time, that's true.
And that is what we offer as a service to our customers is diagnostic accuracy, right?
You don't want to guess.
You don't want to be that shop where you open up the hood and it looks like AutoZone threw up under there, right?
Okay, call us and we'll tell you what's wrong and you can replace one single part, right?
And you don't have to spend four or five hours in order to figure that out.
Your technicians or you can stay on other profitable work.
Will you pay us to tell you what's wrong, right?
And that's, we've been successful in offering that service and doing exactly that.
But of course, we're up against it sometimes too with these vehicles.
It is not always so easy to just say, yep, that's the part, right?
There are certain situations where you get down to it, you know, often like module to module communication.
We're like, well, it's one of these two parts.
You know, we've done everything we can in order to try to determine which one it is, but we're going to have to take a guess, right?
There are those situations out there and I'm sure most of us have been in one.
But there are also the situations and this is really the situation where I'm really thinking about strategic parts replacement as a testing method is in intermittent problems.
And intermittent problems have been the bane of my existence when it comes to diagnostics and trying to run a diagnostic company.
So much so that for a good period of time and even still kind of now today, we just say no to intermittent problems.
Like if it's on our request form, my guy that does the phones is trained to ask people if we can't duplicate the problem
within a 10 minute test drive or 10 minutes of operating the vehicle.
We're not interested.
We're not going to look at it because those have been the ones that have eaten up so much time.
And of course, so much of the time we can't even duplicate the problem at all.
We can't even get it to happen.
You know, we've spent an hour on a car and we have nothing.
And so now we're in that really tough spot of like, okay, we've got a bill for our time.
But then once you've built for the time, guess who's calling you the next time that that car acts up?
Of course, you can set the precedence up front that like, hey, we're not married to this thing, but we do have to charge for our time.
And yeah, you can do that.
But I can tell you from experience, if you're involved, you're involved and you're going to get another call in that car.
The next time it acts up, you're back out there spending more time on it.
And the friction becomes, you know, you're billing every single time you touch that car and spend time on it,
which means you're just more and more connected to that car and eventually you've got to figure out what's going on.
Okay. And so that's the main reason I've avoided them is just waste of time.
I felt guilty about charging a large amount of money on a car that I didn't have a resolution for.
But even if I didn't feel guilty about it, it still marries me to that problem.
Whereas if I just say no, I have no part of that problem.
They can't call me back up later and say, hey, this thing's still a remit and be like, well, I didn't want to look at it at first.
So I didn't and I'm not going to look at it now.
And that's honestly been the more successful method for what we're doing in mobile diagnostics.
Now, of course, we still get wrapped up in these from time to time.
Sometimes the car literally is acting up until we get there and then it stops.
That's happened, right?
It's unpredictable when things are going to be intermittent or not.
And sometimes shops, I think, can be deceitful on this.
We have a couple situations where shops know that we say no to intermittent.
And so they'll tell us that it's acting up and we get out there and it's not.
That's less common, but it does happen.
More often what it is is the car was literally acting up until we got there.
But then once we got there, it started to be an intermittent scenario.
And so at that time, we're trained to just basically say, hey, we're going to charge you a show up fee.
The time to actually come out here.
But we're not going to get invested in this because we're not interested.
We do have some good customers where we want to make sure that they are successful in every aspect of their business,
which requires us to cater to what their needs are.
And as a shop that services customers that have broken cars,
they want to fix those broken cars for their customers, right?
Because they have a good customer that spends thousands of dollars with them per year.
And then they have a Jeep that has this weird problem that causes a check engine light consistently enough, right?
If you drive it for a week, you're going to have the problem,
but intermittent to the point where it takes at least an hour for it to act up.
They want to fix that thing for that customer because it's relatively, you know,
the customer doesn't consider it drivable if that thing is going to happen every week.
But us as a mobile company, it's like it takes an hour for it to do it.
That's a very difficult thing for us.
So we have a few customers like this, scenarios like this.
We get, you know, we get dragged into things like this from time to time.
And the situation that we had this week was exactly that.
It was a 2017 Jeep Renegade.
I'll tell you more about the details, but basically it's a downstream oxygen sensor code that keeps coming back.
It's been to the dealer, it's been to this shop.
It is definitely intermittent.
It takes an hour to act up.
And in this situation, we told them, hey, why don't you bring this to our shop?
And we're lucky enough to have a physical location now.
And that does change things.
If you're doing purely mobile, this gets a little trickier,
but I still want to talk about the framework.
If you have it at a physical location and you have employees that can kind of monitor it,
that does change it.
And if you're in a shop, you're listening to this, you very well might be in a shop.
All of these dynamics could be a little bit different, right?
If you have a low cost employee that you can basically set up things to record on a Pico or on a scan tool
and just send the employee out to go drive it around and say, hey, when it does this, right?
When the light comes on or it stalls or it runs like garbage.
Okay, that's what we're looking for.
Maybe call me or whatever or make sure that the scan tool is still recording at that point.
And then we'll look at the data.
Or maybe it's just something you can let run in the bay next to the one you're working on.
And you can just wait for it to act up right there.
I did that when I was a tech at Firestone.
And I'm just like, okay, hey, this thing only acts up every once in a while, once a day or whatever.
I'd set up all my equipment, just let it run.
And I would be making money on other stuff.
Again, you're doing mobile.
That's pretty difficult.
You can't necessarily do that unless you have multiple cars at one stop, which isn't always the case.
But even then you're still limited on time at a single stop.
So anyways, we get this to our shop, which makes things a little bit easier.
But it's still, it's an hour to get this thing to act up, which makes catching the problem
even if you have all the stuff connected very difficult.
The other scenario, this is a different car, but I had a GMC Sierra with a suspension.
It was like an electronic strut that's controlled by the suspension module.
And it would set a circuit code, but only when you were going out driving over bumps
and going around like roundabouts.
And it wasn't every single time it was really intermittent.
Maybe 15 minutes of driving just to get it to blip and set a circuit code.
And they had already replaced the strut on that one.
But testing that one was really difficult.
I can put my Pico on there, but I get one little dropout here or there.
And then I'm trying to find it.
I can't hang underneath that vehicle and test the wiring while I'm driving.
So I have to come up with a method to try to eliminate down sections of wiring
or figure out is this maybe a control module issue or is it the strut that they put in there?
And anyways, it's very, very, very time consuming.
Even if you had that at your shop, you're going to be spending a ton of time on it.
So where I'm going with this again is strategic parts replacement.
When does it make sense as a test method?
And the framework I've been looking at this in is the amount of money that you could be potentially making
if you were not on that intermittent diagnostic versus the money that you're going to make
spending on that intermittent diagnostic, right?
And that could be just the time waiting for it to happen.
So if it takes an hour to do it, you're burning at least an hour on that car
just so you get that one moment where you can actually catch what's happening
and hopefully do some testing at that point.
Now, do you get all of the data that you need from that one time where it acts up?
Maybe, maybe not.
It's hard to say until it actually happens.
So does that take you two, three hours to really collect the data that you need?
Can you get it with the first time that it happens?
Like, oh, yep, that's definitely a sensor.
That's definitely a wire.
That's definitely a computer.
Maybe it's possible, but you're definitely not going to go that.
You know that going into the scenario.
So what I'm getting at is you spend a lot of time on this.
And what else could that time be used for?
What kind of money could you be making with that time if you were not stuck on that?
And it's opportunity cost, right?
If I spend X amount of time on blank,
what else could I have spent that time on and what would I have gotten from
if I did that other job?
And this is where kind of effective labor rates come into play
because our price and structure, like a lot of shops price and structure,
but you know, mobile company is like, we're charging for the outcome,
not necessarily the time that is spent on the car, right?
We have some ideas for time frames.
Of course, we have to schedule our day.
We have to give, you know, the shop an idea of like it's going to take about this long,
but our pricing structure is on outcomes, right?
We found the broken part or the bad part or, you know, we calibrated that radar.
We programmed that module.
The time is not necessarily a factor.
Again, it is.
You do have to consider, does it take me three hours to program this control module
or, you know, 15 minutes to control program this control module
that is going to have a bearing on the price.
But when we come in, when they call us up and say, hey, we need a GMTCM programmed
or, hey, we need a Ford BCM programmed, we'll say it's X amount of price.
And we know ahead of time, okay, this is going to take us about this long.
But regardless of how long it takes us when we're there, we're billing the same, right?
If my guy is in and out for 15 minutes to do a GM transmission,
I am going to charge the same amount even if it took him an hour.
Now, hopefully it doesn't take an hour, but hey, maybe GM software is weird
or there was something, you know, goofy about the car or whatever.
Sometimes things take longer, but our price for a single programming job is fixed
outside of some, you know, if there's other issues like there's a communication issue on a car.
That's going to be separate.
But given that everything is as expected,
our price is based on the outcome.
So where I'm going with that is if we are efficient, right?
And if we get, let's just say we get the programming time down from,
it usually takes us a half hour to we can be in and out in 15 minutes.
We're charging the same.
We're making more of an effective rate or our effective rate
of what we're charging is going to be more.
So if you look at dollars per hour, it just went up even though the dollar amount
that we charge the customer is the same rate.
It's, it's kind of like flat rate.
That's the thing, right?
The flat rate of course is in time where, hey, if I put this alternator
in the book time is 1.5 hours.
If I do it in an hour, I'm making more than my hourly rate
in an actual physical hour of time.
It takes me two hours to install this alternator.
I'm still getting paid the same.
And so my effective rate is going to be less, right?
It's same idea here.
But we record this and we track this and the business you probably should be doing this
of like each type of job or service that we offer.
And you can, you could, you could do this as a technician to like,
you know, the effective labor rate per technician,
but we look at it per job of the type of service that we offer
and our four main ones are ADOS, keys, programming, diagnostics.
And we look at that effective labor rate of dollars per hour.
What does it bring in on average across a week,
across a month, across a year?
So then we look at it is, okay, if I'm to spend three, four hours
doing this diagnostic and I have a note on that too,
it's like, who's going to necessarily agree to pay that.
I could have made, you know, X amount, or if I had gone to two
or three programming jobs in that same amount of time,
I could have made X amount.
Now you have to take a lot of factors into consideration here.
That's why it's not the easiest thing in the world of, okay,
there's drive time in between the stops.
If I'm going to multiple stops to do programming and ADOS and keys,
maybe if I'm on an intermittent and I charge four hours for it
and they agree to pay for it.
And that's, that's tricky part because, okay, we're up to, you know,
seven, eight, $900 of labor time to drive a vehicle around
for three, four hours to try to catch an intermittent problem.
That's going to, there's going to be some sticker shock with that.
And maybe that's a good thing.
Maybe just blow them out of the water with a really expensive quote.
Maybe if they say, yes, okay, well, now you're on that car.
But then you really just have to look at, okay,
what else could I be making with that particular time?
And when I, when I was a tech, the way I thought about it is
like, if I'm getting just paid straight hourly time on something,
you know, I'm just getting paid by the hour to go drive this car
around, try to find it.
That's great and all the, you know, those four hours are guaranteed
to me, the customer agreed up to four hours straight time.
But here's the deal.
If you're efficient in your work and you can beat book time,
if you will, or you can be more effective with the time doing
other things, you're actually losing money on that one where
you're just getting paid straight time.
And I would always think about that as a tech.
If I was doing front end work, you know, I'm doing four ball
joints struts and an alignment, I can smoke book time on that
and make, I could do two of those jobs within the time that it
took me to do the four hour drive the car around and catch
the intermittent.
So in no way shape or form did I want to do that.
I wanted to do the stuff that I could be more effective at.
So we look at that as well when we're considering spending the
time on it or doing, you know, again, more effective work
that's bringing more money.
Okay.
So where do we take all of this?
How do we use that to consider the testing?
This is the meat of it here is when does component replacement
make the most sense?
And this is strategic component replacement.
This is not guessing.
This is a controlled experiment with a known cost is we've done
our initial inspection of the car.
You know, we know what the symptoms are.
Maybe we know what the codes are.
We understand the system and the components involved.
This show is brought to you by auto rescue tools and Isaac
Rodel.
If you've been looking for a programming laptop, you're not
sure which one to buy or how to set it up, especially if
you want to program multiple brands.
You know, you've got some domestic vehicles.
You've got European vehicles.
Can the same software go on the same laptop?
What size hard drive do I need?
All those questions.
Isaac's your guy.
He can custom set up programming laptops that are ready to
tackle any make or model.
I got one of these laptops myself and I can say that it is
outstanding and it really streamlines the process by having
everything you need in one device.
So if you're looking for something like that, I highly
recommend checking out auto rescue tools.com.
You'll also find scan tools, diagnostic equipment, key
cutting equipment and much more.
Check out the link in the show notes.
I highly recommend it.
And maybe we've done a little bit of testing.
Maybe we got it to act up once, maybe not, but we take it
into consideration what components are involved with
the system and is there any likely component that maybe
is a known failure rate on a particular vehicle or it is
something where eliminating that component would be very
time consuming or difficult to do.
And this is quite often a control module.
And that's quite often the scenario where you'll find
yourself here of like, okay, if I put a control module in
this vehicle as a test, you know, what is the possibility
that it's going to fix the problem?
Now, of course, this all comes full circle back to like,
that's a weird problem.
I guess I'll just throw a control module at it.
And I don't think this is quite the same as that.
Because if you look at it this way, if I go to the shop and
I say, hey, we're going to spend four hours on this,
trying to catch it and diagnose it and be very sure that
it is an engine control module on this Jeep.
And we can, maybe they'll, you know, maybe they'll go
for that.
And, you know, maybe we end up finding it is the engine
control module.
And of course they didn't pay for the control module on
top of that, but we could say, hey, you know, thousand bucks
to let us do this for four hours and we'll get you
your answer.
At least that's the cap, right?
If we don't figure it out within four hours, we'll
give you a call.
Or we could get a used engine control module as a test
part.
It's only $50.
If we want to purchase it, we can mark it up.
If they want to purchase it, they're only spending $50.
And we would program it, install it, and then, you know,
see if that fixes it.
Now you're still going to have to wait the time to see
if it acts up.
But this is what we did with this vehicle this week,
is we had a very strange problem.
It was a circuit high voltage code on the downstream
sensor, had already been to the dealer.
They'd already replaced the oxygen sensor.
This shop got it.
They replaced both oxygen sensors as a test.
Didn't fix it.
And you can kind of see like this car is just a part
can and car, right?
But again, as intermittent, it was tough to catch.
We got it to act up once or twice.
And we saw what happened.
Basically what would happen is the circuit voltage
on the signal wire for the downstream would go
above the amount of voltage that I would expect
a narrowband sensor to be able to create.
Now these are the Chrysler style O2 sensors
where they have a bias voltage that is on both
the ground and the signal wire.
So if you look at the raw voltages, they're up,
you know, two and a half to three and a half normally.
But the narrowband itself is only producing at max
about a volt.
This thing would peg up to, it was over 1.2 volts
for a consistent period of time.
And actually once we saw it go negative,
which I have seen an O2 sensor make negative voltage,
I'm not exactly sure about the physics of how it happens.
But if you consider it a battery, which kind of sort of is
it's chemical reaction making voltage potential,
there must be some sort of flipping of the polarity
to make a negative voltage.
Anyways, we saw that, we thought that was weird.
And then we also saw it go above at times.
Now this is all very intermittent.
But it's a very strange problem.
Now, could this be a wiring issue?
It's possible.
We looked at it.
We did a visual on the harness.
We didn't see anything.
You know, external things rubbing outside of the harness,
but maybe something is happening inside the harness.
We see that plenty of times.
Could the sensor still be bad?
You know, it's possible they had a dealer sensor in there,
but this doesn't necessarily mean that it's good.
We have something weird where there's a, you know, a crack
in the exhaust.
This one, they were pretty close together.
They were like both on the catalytic converter in this case.
But we did an inspection.
We didn't see that.
So at this point, it's, hey, do we spend a ridiculous amount
of time on this and you pay X amount of money?
Or do we take this relatively cheap part, install it,
and then we see what happens for a quarter of that price,
which is pretty much the case in this point.
It's like, this is a low cost test that we actually have,
you know, things pointing towards that this is a possibility
that it could be an engine control module, right?
You guys have already replaced the sensors a couple of times.
We don't see external damage to this harness.
No, we haven't torn it apart yet.
But the module is only $50.
It is a possibility that this could be the problem, right?
And then we're not spending four hours on this thing.
We're spending a half hour to program it.
And you do have to weigh in something like that.
If you're replacing the component, number one,
what is the cost of the component to do?
And then once you replace it, right, is it reversible?
Is it something where I can just swap the old part back?
If you're purchasing that part, you know, are you going
to own it?
I would say in a lot of cases, yeah, you don't want to play
that game with the parts department too often of like,
I'm returning this because it didn't fix the problem
I wanted to fix.
You might just have that on your shelf.
And you might want to consider that like, hey,
this is a cost of doing this test.
But that's what this is all about is the cost of the test
that you're performing.
And I think about this all the time when I'm doing work
on cars is what is the most effective test that I can do
that gives me the most amount of information or eliminates
the most amount of possibilities for the least amount of effort,
time or cost, right?
Time is money, of course.
And we think about this with all kinds of stuff that we do
like we try to find these shortcuts that eliminate a ton
of things for us or check a lot of things all at once.
Right?
The real simple one is like a thermistor circuit,
right?
A variable resistor with temperature.
And you have a circuit code for it.
Go to the thermistor.
You unplug it.
You put a jumper across it.
You look at your scan tool.
It should go from negative 40 unplugged to its max
jumper with a jumper wire, you know, 300 degrees
or whatever it is.
If that happens, you just tested so much stuff,
all of the wiring up to the sensor, the computer,
the computer's ability to assess the circuit,
all of that's good with a jumper wire and a scan tool.
That's it.
If you still have a problem, it's pin fitment
or it's a sensor.
You're done, right?
And so that's a really simple example,
but that is an example of where I utilize this
thinking in how much stuff can I eliminate
with one potential test, right?
Now, if we're replacing a control module
and even if it doesn't fix that Jeep,
I think about the time spent on it,
the cost of the part that went into it.
And we eliminated, you know, 30% of the potential
problems in that particular circuit for that weird problem.
And all that other time that I didn't spend
on sitting there waiting for the car to mess up,
I can be out doing other things.
Now, of course, that depends on you actually
having those other things to do.
But we're busy.
We have calls, right?
I got modules to program.
I got keys to program.
I got ADAS stuff to calibrate
where I could be making money on that stuff
instead of sitting there waiting for a Jeep to screw up.
And in that case, I was like,
yeah, let's get a module for this thing and try it.
We'll put it in there and then we'll run it for an hour.
And luckily I do have, you know, a shop
and I do have a new employee
where the cost of him is not extremely high
to just have him babysit it while he's doing the other stuff
he needs to at the shop.
And that is a benefit.
Again, if your mobile is tough,
but you could even just say the shop like,
well, let's put this module in here
and you guys just run it for a day
and then you let me know and I'll come back
and check it out if there's an issue.
But this is the sort of thing where
I didn't always have this thought process
as it was going through things of like,
if this part is really inexpensive,
easy to replace, it's reversible,
it should be part of my options for testing, right?
It's not guesswork in this point.
It shouldn't be if you're just throwing a part at it
for no reason, but you're weighing it
against what else you would have to do.
Like, how difficult would it be
for me to condemn that control module
even if I was able to get it to act up,
but in that case it's really difficult?
Well, the $50 for that part,
now I realize not all control modules are that cheap, right?
That's why this is a case by case basis.
But for that one, the $50 that that module
cost me to eliminate that whole part
of the system from this particular problem
was so worth it.
As soon as I heard that, I'm like,
oh, just get the module for it.
Let's just do it.
Let's put it in there and see what happens.
And it did end up fixing this one.
The voltage change definitely seemed to be
something within the ECM.
We opened it up.
I didn't see any corrosion.
There were no updates for it.
But that was the problem on this one.
And, of course, then it's up the shop.
Do you guys want to stick with this used one?
Do you want a new one?
We'll let them handle that with their customer.
But we know for sure that, hey,
it's fixed at the moment is not doing this anymore
with this used control module in there.
But in that case, that is the cheapest way I can go.
Not only for my own time, right?
What else I could be doing with that time,
but it's actually a better service to the customer.
Whether that be the owner of the vehicle
or our customer, you know,
we charged you $1,000 to, you know,
monitor these circuits and figure this out.
And now you need to buy a control module
because that's where we would have ended up with.
Or we charge them a fraction of the time,
plus maybe, you know, control module programming
and their cars fixed, right?
It's actually cheaper for the customer in that case.
Now, what if we were to get it wrong?
Of course, my personal opinion,
I would eat that module
and the time spent to program it,
but it's still beneficial to me
because now I've eliminated the components.
And sometimes, and I think most of us have been here,
is you just make the wrong call on something,
hey, it happens, like you really did think
that was the problem, you put it in, it's not.
Well, now it forces you to think like,
well, okay, well, it's not that it has to be,
you know, this or one of these other things
and you look at it a little bit differently, right?
Not ideal, but it does force your thought process
to move on to another component
and be like, okay, well, this has to be the issue.
How could it be the issue?
How could I test it in order to make that happen?
But I didn't always think about, hey,
how cheap would the part be to throw in here
to verify that this fixes it?
But I'm adding that into my mindset
when I'm going into diagnostics.
And to be totally honest, I've kind of done this
when there are multiple components
of a single thing on a car.
What I mean by this is like, let's say ignition coils,
it's the easiest one to reference.
You've got multiple ignition coils.
You've got a problem with one, swap it over to the other one.
Does the problem follow it?
Okay, that's a really great effective test
if you can get to the ignition coil easily enough.
I would do this with wheel speed sensors for circuit codes.
Lots of times we get kind of weird wheel speed sensor codes.
I'll swap the wire over to the other one
and prove out that, oh, okay, that gets rid of this code.
It's definitely in the sensor.
No, it doesn't.
It must be in the wiring, right?
Same thing when we have the option on the car.
I'm not buying a part in that case.
I'm just using the other one on the car
to verify where the fault is.
But again, if a part's 20 bucks for a wheel speed sensor,
I can just plug it in.
I might consider doing that.
If the module's 50 to $100 at a junkyard.
And of course, you do have to consider,
what's the time of getting that, getting it to you,
and then programming it.
There's a cost involved in that too.
But again, my thought process here is specifically around
intermittent and at least offering to the customer
of, hey, it's X amount for us to do this for four hours
or we could take an educated guess
if you will or strategic parts replacement.
And it's only going to be this amount.
Maybe it fixes it.
Maybe it doesn't.
If not, we've eliminated a lot
and we can move forward in the diagnostic
and then leave it up to them to see where you want to go.
Again, our goal, our service is to provide accuracy,
which is why we want some ammunition
behind the parts testing.
And we also do want to consider the cost of the part, right?
If it's $1,000 for that module, which it sometimes is.
Well, then we need to be a lot more cautious
and again, weigh that against the time
that we're spending to diagnose it.
So let me know what you think about that.
Let me know if any of you have, you know,
thought about that in your own testing and diagnostics.
It's just something that was top of mind this week
after one that it actually worked out on.
You know, we chucked a module at it if you will,
but it got us our answer.
We spent way less time on it.
The customer ultimately ended up paying less money
for that service.
But yeah, just more stuff as learning and growing
as not only a technician, but a business owner.
So hopefully you enjoyed that.
Got something out of that.
That's where we will wrap this up.
But with that all the way, let's get out there.
Start fixing the world one car at a time.
About this episode
Sean Tipping dives into the challenges of diagnosing intermittent automotive problems and the strategic use of parts replacement as a testing method. He discusses balancing diagnostic time, costs, and effective labor rates, sharing real-world examples like a tricky Jeep oxygen sensor issue solved by swapping a low-cost control module. The episode explores when replacing a part makes sense versus prolonged testing, emphasizing controlled experiments over guesswork. Sean also highlights the business side of diagnostics, including pricing strategies and opportunity costs, offering insights for both mobile and shop-based technicians.
Original notes
Today on the show I share a thought process that I've been adding into my diagnostic decision making. We weigh the value of any test method we perform- How much time/effort/cost does a test require? How much does it tell me/how many things does it eliminate? When faced with a time consuming, difficult, (and often intermittent) diagnostic challenge, should we consider that a part replacement is the cheapest AND most effective test that we could perform? Is this the best value for the customer while at the same time freeing up our time for more productive work???
Website- https://autodiagpodcast.com/
Facebook Group- https://www.facebook.com/groups/223994012068320/
YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/@automotivediagnosticpodcas8832
Email- [email protected]
Please make sure to check out our sponsors!
SJ Auto Solutions- https://sjautosolutions.com/
Automotive Seminars- https://automotiveseminars.com/
L1 Automotive Training- https://www.l1training.com/
Autorescue tools- https://autorescuetools.com/
Automotive Diagnostic Podcast
Sean Tipping
0:00
37:36