Getting Started

Pattern Failures

Why do we focus so much on pattern failures? Let’s face it; experience is the best guide to quickly diagnosing a problem. If you have seen the problem before you know almost immediately what’s wrong the next time you see it. You can save a lot of time by going right to the problem and verifying it, rather than breaking out the fourteen page diagnostic trouble tree and testing for continuity between pin 113 of connector C13 and pin 8 of connector A11 (etc, etc). We have all been there and we know it’s usually a waste of time.

But what if you haven’t seen it before? Well chances are pretty good that someone else has. Why not spend a few seconds and see? Sure you can probably find the problem on your own. And that’s great! But if it’s been seen before and documented, why spend time following some obscure trouble tree when you can get a list of the most likely causes, and check those quickly?

While some problems have been seen a hundred times, others are more rare. If you don’t find the tip for your particular problem consider submitting it to the database so that the next time someone runs into it you can save them time

Tips

What is a Tip? A Tip is a test and repair procedure for a known issue with a certain vehicle (year, make, model, and engine). A Tip includes specific information about symptoms, related codes, test procedure(s), cause of failure and the correction.

The Tips are designed to be straight forward and help you to quickly find known problems specific to the car you are working on.

Generic Tips

While Generic Tips do have the same structure as a Tip (symptom, cause, test procedure) they are not vehicle specific. That means that they apply to your car and possibly thousands of similar cars. The test procedures may be less specific and require a little more thought to apply to the car you are working on.

Mode$06

If you are unfamiliar with the wide availability and use of Mode$06 we strongly encourage you to read the getting started with mode$06 article.

How to get help

Search our database

First stop, the vehicle page. Click the vehicle link on the tool box and enter the specific year, make, model and engine you are working on. Once you are on the vehicle page you will find some information immediately available. Some specs, some service precautions, engine photos, etc.

Drivability problems

If you have a trouble code you should always include it in your search. Including a symptom in your search will refine the exact matches but some matches may be moved to the fuzzy matches. Only click symptoms that actually apply, don’t just click all the symptoms, you will get too many results and they won’t be as relevant.

Now, a word about trouble codes. The most common mistake when searching for codes is a typo in the code, such as typing PO 125 or p125 instead of P0125. Most of the time our search engine will catch common typos, but always be careful when entering codes.

Interpreting the results

Most search engines rank results by relevance, as does ours. But we also include other factors when ranking the results such as the frequency of occurrence and user feedback. So, if a tip matches a code that you entered, it will be ranked higher in the results than one that matches your symptom but not your code, since codes are much more specific than symptoms. Also if a repair is very common and scored very high by our users it will be given a higher rank in the results making it easier for you to find the most common problems.

Waveforms

Given the vast number of vehicles in the database it is often difficult to get exact matches for waveforms, but fortunately the fuzzy search waveforms will often help. If you don’t find what you’re looking for please consider uploading one of your own so that the next time it will be there.

Post in the forum

If you don’t find what you are looking for and feel like you might need some help tracking the problem down, take a few minutes and post your problem in the forum. Try to include specific information such as the year, make, model, engine size, any codes or symptoms, and the results of any test you have performed. If you have a waveform or screen capture of some data, post that too. The more information you post the quicker someone will be able to help you.

Articles

There are two primary groups of articles “How-to” articles and “Technical” articles. The Technical articles focus more on theory and operation; while some specific vehicles may be referenced they are more general in nature. The “How-To” articles are usually specific to single or small group of vehicles, but these articles will contain a much more detailed account of how to perform specific tasks on specific vahicles.