My car has been running a little rough at idle when cold. It would sometimes cut out for a moment and almost stall. The “Check Engine” light came on. It was due for a Test-Only smog check so I took it in for a smog test. The smog guy said the car passed except for the Check Engine light. He handed me a paper describing a $500 repair credit for smog-related repairs from the State.<\/p>\n
I took my car to the mechanic at 400 Guerrero. He said, “I looked for a few hours. Maybe it’s the throttle sensor, maybe the computer. I don’t have the equipment to check the computer. Take it somewhere else. I won’t charge you.”<\/p>\n
I took my car to a dealer in Walnut Creek, Michael Stead (because all the local Chrysler dealers are closed because of effing General Motors going into the shitter). They replaced the throttle sensor for $500. Before I got home, the problem manifested itself again.<\/p>\n
I took the car to the dealer again and now they say it’s an intermittent open connection in the electrical system. They want to charge me $1,800 to replace the entire wiring harness. Is this reasonable?<\/strong><\/p>\n The dealer will reimburse me the $500 for the mistaken throttle sensor problem. And I should<\/em> get $500 free money from the state.<\/p>\n If I get a second opinion, might a mechanic be able to find and replace the one bad wire in the electrical system for less than $1,800? Do I dare try cutting and soldering wires myself? I mean, if it’s broken copper in a wire, it’s $1 of wire that’s gone bad.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My car has been running a little rough at idle when cold. It would sometimes cut out for a moment and almost stall. The “Check Engine” light came on. It was due for a Test-Only smog check so I took it in for a smog test. The smog guy said the car passed except for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}