I own a 1992 toyota camry 3.0 v6, it began running poorly,smoking badly and smelled gasy.I took it to a shop,they said they traced it back to the ecm or computer. they tried two computers but it didnt fix it. after waiting two months I took the car to a different shop. they have tried a few computers with no luck, now they think it may have got some bad gas. the car has been at this shop now for almost 4 months. the car only has 125,000 miles on it. Im wondering why cant they fix it.
By any chance did you diesel in it?
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Because they don’t know what they’re doing, and are just throwing random (and expensive) parts at it in the hopes that you will go away.
What kind of shop are you taking it to? If you’re taking it to the local chain quickie-lube/muffler franchise, don’t. You need a good local independent shop that has good reviews, preferably from known-trustworthy sources.
Because they lack the mnowledge to follow a troubleshooting tree and testing everything for the correct voltages fo everything every step of the way so they jump ahead and replace the computer before they did all the necessary tests.
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I think the problem has something to do with… the car is 28 years old. Mileage doesn’t matter at this point.
My experience has been that mechanics start blaming “the computer” when they either don’t know what else is wrong, or are trying to scare off the customer because they don’t want to work on the car.
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I think @oldtimer-11 most likely nailed it . . .
It sounds like the shops aren’t using a systematic approach to diagnosing the car’s problem(s)
And maybe they also haven’t checked the basics
Those are pretty obvious symptoms
The shop(s) should have been able to figure it out by now
Time to find a new shop
The guy that figures it out will probably be middle aged, have a lot of patience and be a pretty good reader . . . in other words be able to properly interpret service information