Working on 2000 and Later Vehicles

The following is my opinion and just my opinion.  Take it for what it's worth!

I believe that if you are not an ASE certified mechanic and have the proper testing equipment, then you have no business going under the hood of a 2000 or later vehicle!  No old school procedures will work when trying to diagnose problems or doing any repairs and will probably cause more expensive repairs by damaging sensitive computer components!

I know all you do-it-yourself people out there think you should be able to fix anything and have had few problems working on vehicles up to now, but these later vehicles just don’t work that way.  I personally have quit working on 2000 and later alternators.  I’ve had too many failures that have cost me more money than I ever made off the unit and I don’t believe the fault was mine or the unit I sold them, but I had to warrant them anyway.  I can’t count on the installer to take the proper care when hooking up the wires, that he doesn’t create a spark and damage the sensitive regulator circuitry! 

What makes matters worse is that if the battery goes dead, you have to have the car towed to a dealer or a qualified mechanic to reprogram the cars computer.  You can't jump start it and you can't just change the battery.  Makes you wonder how much it will cost you every time the battery runs down because you left on a light or the battery fails.  It's been my experience that I only get about three and a half years out of a battery and I don't want to buy one prematurely just to keep me from paying the dealer an extra hundred bucks to reprogram the computer in my car.  To top this off you have to have a mechanic or a dealer to change the damn battery because they have to hook up a power source to the vehicles computer while removing and installing the battery to keep the computer active!  WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP!

The problems with these are both political and the technology race.  The damn politicians keep passing laws for vehicle safety and emissions. Though some of these laws have made things cleaner and safer, there seems to be overkill to some of this, which has forced auto manufacturers to come up with technology that will keep up with the mandates.  This technology costs lots of money and causes extra problems when the car malfunctions.  Also, it is a ploy to make you have to bring your car to the dealer and it also makes the repairs so expensive!  Who pays for all of this?  WE do!  We do, in higher prices for new cars.  We do, for way overpriced diagnostic and repair costs.  We do, in simple repairs we should have been able to do ourselves but now have to pay the dealer!

This makes me wonder what's going to happen to the poorer people in this country.  There are millions of them, they cant afford the payments, taxes and insurance on a new car and the older cars are wearing out.  Even if they could afford a new car on extended payments, the warranty runs out and only one breakdown would render their car useless, as they could never be able to afford the cost of the repairs.

The politicians of both parties are so out of touch with the common people of this country that they only serve to hinder the problem instead of finding solutions to the problems!  I see no end in site toward a solution to all of this short of stop buying new cars and demand that the manufacturers build simpler, easier to fix cars!

Oh how I miss the days when cars were simple to work on!