My car started kangarooing and suffering from symptoms of hesitation which made me feel like it was some sort of fuel or air starvation, and the ELM light would come on for brief periods in between these judders I took it to Vauxhall who diagnosed it as being the "Mass Air Unit" and that it would cost me £328 to replace. I asked them how they got to this conclusion and they said that they had plugged into the ECU and got the fault code that had told them this was the faulty unit, and that it needed replacing We picked the car up after they told us it was repaired with the newly fitted "Mass Air Unit" but the ELM light was on again and the car still obviously wasnt right They linked up to the ECU again and told us that the ECU was throwing up the same code as before and that it must be the ECU itself, and that I would have to cough up another £750 to have a new one fitted. I asked if the code was the same, perhaps they should re-fit my old "Mass Air Filter" and try it with a new ECU to see if I could at least save the £350 that I might have unnecessarily spent on it NO they said as the part was now second hand because it had been fitted to my car and that it was just a matter of "process of elimination" and that the unit must have been faulty otherwise it would not have reported it as being so I asked if it was possible to overhaul the ECU as I am a programmer and know that this unit can have parts either replaced or reprogrammed if necessary, but they only offered a direct replacement as they couldnt offer any overhaul services. I have found some sites on the web just by doing a Google search for "ECU repair" http://tunemycar.com/ecu_exchange___repair.html which offer ECU diagnosis from just £15-35 and includes some reprogramming of faulty ones if you post it to them, so Im going to give it my best shot to save myself £1100 and see if I can prove that the part changed was not faulty at all The problem all too often seems to be that these so called mechanics cannot offer the old services that were there by trained mechanics who would go and check the basics first like spark plugs, the jetting system and possible bad connections. But instead now just connect a computer to the ECU and do what the fault codes tell them to do! The big companies dont want to spend thousands to train mechanics only to find them leaving years on to set up their own backyard garage service centres and doing them out of the biggest profit making part of the car market So they have made these modern vehicles more and more difficult to understand, and smaller back street garages cannot afford the £50,000 per manufacturer to buy the relevant equipment and software licences to fix these cars Once the warranty of your car runs out you are in their hands, and can only think of upgrading to a newer car that is within warranty when you are hit with problems like this that dont go away without throwing massive amounts of money at I cant see light at the end of the tunnel yet, but will persevere to prove them wrong and show that I dont need to empty my pockets of £1100 or more if they then tell me it wasnt the ECU after all Will keep you posted when I get the equipment to sort this ECU out myself if I have to, and offer the knowledge to other disgruntled Zafira owners via this site Sorry about not publishing my email, but I cannot afford any more spam crawlers grabbing my address and giving me more rubbish mail. Will send in an update as soon as I can. |
