Car troubles

[johnridley]

As I posted before, I finally took the Taurus in for service. They fixed the main issues but never found the flaky speedo problem the girls reported. So today T and I headed out to a few stores, and took the Taurus for the first road test since the repair.

Not good; about the time it was getting well and truly warm, it started to miss badly, and the check engine light started flashing. Flashing is bad. It's never flashed before. I know that means critical problem, but a quick look showed that I had oil pressure, and the engine was not overheating, and I was already at perihelion from home and about to start hitting stores on the way back. We went to Recycle Ann Arbor to unload a whole lot of packing peanuts. When we got there, there was smoke coming from the engine compartment. Smelled like rubber. It was coming from the serpentine belt area. We dumped off the recycling and I started heading for Chelsea to leave it at the dealers. We made it though it had very little power, it was missing badly and the engine light was flashing all the way.

There was no smoke coming from the engine when we got there, and it didn't even really smell that bad (at the recycle center, FOUR people came up to me and said "Um, you know your engine is smoking?" The woman in front of me said "That smells like serpentine belt burning up" which it did. Anyway, at this point I'm betting that the dealership put something back together wrong or incompletely and some hose (maybe EGR or something) burned through, causing massive crazy readings, extremely bad fuel mix, and the smell. Anyway, the thing is in the dealer lot. We're one up on cars anyway. Tuesday morning I'll bike to the dealer (they don't open until 7:30) and fill them in on the symptoms.

Comments

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

My cars have always read high -- My last toy would be going about 65 when it was 70-indicated. My current Toy, though, reads DARNED close to the actual speed. When my GPS says I'm doing 70, the speedometer is still over a portion of the 70-line.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's much excuse for inaccuracy anymore. Speedos used to be pretty crude mechanical things, but these days they are digital readouts. Even if it looks like a gauge, it's a digital gauge, and the computer knows exactly how fast you're going. The only source of inaccuracy is if the tire size is wrong. It would be nice if they allowed you to adjust that to get closer accuracy when you changed your tire size, but people would use it to cheat on their odometers.