I agree with the prove it or pay the warranty claim stance. This would be the same as denying warranty for an aftermarket muffler.That would be in violation of the Magnuson Moss act. A straight pipe taking the place of the muffler should be acceptable as well as an empty muffler unless the owners manual expressly states the part must meet strict specs equal to the factory part.
I think the denial is using an old mechanics myth that back pressure must be present for proper operation of the engine. That is just not true with modern closed loop engine management.
Hot Rod 3-cylinder compact SUV, I wonder what other modifications were made.
A co-worker has a Fiat 500 Abarth with no muffler, I would expect the Abarth to be able to take more abuse than a Buick that was engineered for fuel economy.
The warranty is 5/50 but that is for defects in materials or workmanship. Lack of verifiable maintenance records or finding little to no oil in the engine is more than sufficient to deny any warranty. Thatâs an owner defect; not an automotive one.
Jobless with a 21 model car, spent money to butcher the exhaust, and is said to drive around all the time while unemployed with gas prices through the roof.
Just my opinion, but around here the operative phrase is jump the fence to taunt the bull and you may get gored.
Right, and Iâm assuming the cats are still in place - which is what is going to slow the exhaust more than a muffler.
Agreed. I could see removing an exhaust restriction possibly setting a check engine light regarding air fuel ratio or something. But I donât buy that it ruined the turbo. How would it ruin it? The bearings? Nah.
I read a little and it seems issues with the turbo on this engine arenât all that uncommon at relatively low mileage with no modifications. I believe if I was in this guyâs position, Iâd have a shop weld the muffler back in place and try my luck at another dealership. At least it wonât sound like a bumble bee when they pull it into the service bay and he may stand a better chance.
How can the shop be held liable? They only did what they were âhiredâ to do. Wouldnât it be the same if went into a shop and told them to install a set of 100 watt driving lights and the the alternator burned up? Is that the shops fault? My understanding modifying the exhaust after the cat is not illegal or anything. In most cases deleting the muffler is illegal, but isnât that on the owner of the vehicle? Just trying to under stand the reasoning here?
Yeah, those donât even have a muffler from the factory. The turbo itself does enough to muffle the sound from the engine, though itâs still fairly loud stock. The SRT-4 Dodges (Neon and Caliber) also came from the factory without mufflers IIRC.
Speaking broadly, at some point the issue of best practices and professional accountability come into view. No, itâs not illegal to remove a muffler or to install enough driving lights that the alternator burns up. But, should things ever get that far, a court of law may and has decided that the âmechanicâ should have known better, as he is the trained professional, aware of potential consequences, and can be held liable for executing a customerâs stupid decisions.
Many years as a shop manager and shop owner have taught me that saying no is often the best answer. You have a 2022 F150 and you want me to install a lift kit and mudders? Nope. You want to do a DEF delete on your diesel? Nope. You want me to cut your muffler off? Nope.
The automotive industry in general has a black eye, and one of the easiest things we can do to remedy that is to stop taking part in other peopleâs stupid decisions.
As far as the original question posted here, it seems we have an unemployed driver who just spends his days driving around in a 1 year old car that he has hacked up and has his mother paying the bills. As a mechanic I would leave these troubles for another shop to sort out. Sometimes we can fix the car but not the customer.
I agree. Often the customer is the problem and not the car. If someone wanted a performance car, maybe they should have bought something with more than 3 cylinders and not a Buick. Some of these are quite peppy but Buicks arenât typically driven by the same crowd that has a hotrodded Civic.
I can understand the dealer wanted to replace the entire exhaust but have no idea if the price quoted is right. Basically that system is part of what failed and it has been modified in a way that the engineers didnât anticipate. Odds are decent shop could weld the muffler back on without issues but I donât know how the system is designed. The dealer might just want to cover their bases, earn some extra money, or a combination.
Typically modifying an emissions system from factory is illegal. Of course people do it all the time and it isnât illegal for off-road use such as racing or mudding events so that is always an excuse. In my line of work (IT), I have customers calling with requests that I refuse to take on such as installing a 15 year old drive in a new computer. Also, many people still want to run Windows XP and want to trick the web browser, etc. into allowing access to banking, medical, and other secure sites. There are actually legal precedents and regulations that anyone involved in allowing insecure systems to handle sensitive can be subject to pretty hefty fines and civil penalties. Running an unsupported operating system such as Windows XP definitely falls outside of acceptable practices and has been the result of many data breaches and penalties (think EquiFax).
I donât know if there are laws such as this with non-safety related modifications on cars but a mechanic can be held liable if a customer insists on taking a car out of the shop with a safety issue such as failed brakes. Also, some states might take this more seriously than others. You would probably get a free pass here in Missouri based on some of the cars I see driving around but maybe not so much in California???
I learned a long time ago that trusting your gut and refusing jobs you know are a bad idea is the best way to go. I got burned on this a time or two when I first started my business. One example I can think of is the guy who simply wanted me to format and reinstall an OS on an obviously failing hard drive. He didnât want to spend the money to replace the drive and formatting had marked the bad sectors of the failing drive off long enough for him to use it several more months until he brought it to me. I told him this was simply a duct tape fix and wouldnât work long term but couldnât give him an exact timetable as to how long it would hold. I told him it was a bad idea and that it might last him 2 days or 2 years. It lasted about 2 weeks and of course I was the bad guy for doing such lousy work even when I told him multiple times that this wouldnât work for long. At this point I made up a form for people to sign if they insisted on something that wasnât a good practice. NO ONE ever signed the form. They either had it done right or went somewhere else. The form stated why the task at hand was a bad idea and that the customer would be completely liable for any issues with no warranty of any kind on the service. At this point I just refuse to even deal with stuff like this. Plenty of others still do and I hear all the complaints about them and people are willing to pay to have it done right after getting burned.
Unfortunately you hear similar stories from anyone in a service business. One of my buddies owns an HVAC service and sees a competitor that installs natural gas and propane appliances interchangeably. A natural gas appliance will not run correctly on propane. Parts can be changed out on some equipment and fix this but he says water heaters need to go when it is done with them. Anyway, the best bet is to leave the hack work like this to your competitors and be the one that cleans up the messes.
I would like to stop focusing on the owner here. I really am not out to make someone look bad. He goes to my church and if you know Southern Baptist churches in the south, no more needs to be said.
He has a history of removing mufflers off his cars in the past because he likes loud pipes. He didnât modify anything else. I have warned him in the past that loud pipes draw the wrong kind of attention but he has yet to get any kind of a ticket, speeding or loud pipes. I also warned him when he bought the car that if he removed the muffler on this car, it could be a problem with warranty work. I didnât predict this.
But he made the mistake but I believe the dealer has taken him for a ride right from the start including the sale itself. I have advised him to get all his paperwork together and take advantage of the free hour that most lawyers will give.
BTW, I havenât seen the car since it went into the shop
Lack of oil in this case would not void the warranty on the turbo in most cases as most failures are the oil seal. It dumps all the oil out of the engine in just a few minutes or less, but this does not seem to be the case here as he drove it to the dealership. He had a CEL and low power.
From my research, the turbo MTBF is around 100k to 125k miles. Early failures are rare. However, the (gas) pedal position sensor has a high failure rate and dealers have been known to misdiagnose this as a turbo failure.
But I do thank you all for your opinions on the turbo question. Not sure it will help him but I just wanted to know if anyone shared my opinion.
regarding powertrain warranty and turbo- on my diesels, the turbo is part of the emissions system, I believe, and therefore have a longer warranty period than the engine. Itâs been a while since I looked in depth at it, though, so I could be mistaken.
Could this be the case here? Check the owners manual.
There is no reason that I know of for why back pressure would be needed for a turbo to function properly. The amount of exhaust flow will be nearly identical without the small amount of back pressure that the muffler creates. I think more pressure in the exhaust should actually make the turbine spin faster. Based on your MTBF, they used a poor quality turbo or are stressing it beyond what itâs designed for and itâs supposed to last somewhat beyond the warranty period and thatâs it. The driver probably drives it hard which caused the early failure.
Did the turbo blow up and send debris out the exhaust or in through the intake?
Can it be driven as is without the turbo? I read on here a while back that some engine computers donât have fuel maps that cover the low manifold pressure resulting from a missing turbo, so it ends up running to rich or something.
Any examples of this? I looked in to EquiFax and it appears to be due to a software vulnerability in modern and currently supported cloud based computing framework, which is pretty much the opposite of what Windows XP is. A developer and researcher even deliberately put an open source security vulnerability in to Linux to see if they would catch it, and they didnât. They approved it.
Some of the crazy things that go on are amazing, especially from those who are licensed and supposed to be trusted. Propane burns a lot hotter per amount of gas so that would be a big issue.
I donât see an issue with installing a mild lift. Some dealerships do it before they put the truck on the sales lot. I donât see any issue with you not wanting to do it at your shop, however, if you just choose not to. I donât see an issue with the manufacturer voiding the warranty for certain suspension and drive train parts after the lift is installed either. Sort of a âyou have to pay to playâ scenario.
I see it in a little different light than illegal stuff, though, like the def system removal (epa) and muffler delete (sound ordinances) that you mentioned.
I take it youâd rather avoid the hassle, which I get. Customers need to be aware itâll ride worse, handle worse, have less power (unless gears are changed), and hasten wear of certain components. So, yeah, in hindsight I guess I see why youâd avoid doing the job .
Depending on how well the original dealership documented the issue of the altered exhaust and then there is the issue as how universal the dealership documentation is dealership-wide; I would recommend they put the original exhaust system back on, maybe touch up the weld with some heat resistant paint and take it to another dealershipâŠ
I mentioned the oil quality/quantity scenario for one reason. Every turbocharger I have ever swapped except for one died because of lack of oil changes or running the motor oil level low; or both. Thereâs a reason why car makers recommend more frequent oil changes on a boosted car.
As for pipes and mufflers I have to disagree with that theory. The Street Outlaws running turbos donât seem to have a problem and one thing they donât have is mufflers and long pipes as is F1, etc. Same could be said for aircraft engines.
Cut/paste below is what Garrett turbochargers has to say about it and Mahle, who supplies many OEM turbo units, concurs with it.
The three turbo killers
Less than 1% of turbos fail because of manufacturing defects. Most failures are caused by the three âturbo killersâ of oil starvation, oil contamination and foreign object damage.
There appears to be some confusion about how warranty works. Allow me to address that:
First, I am not a lawyer, but I worked for a major tire manufacturer in the warranty department and talked to our corporate attorneys about the subject, to make sure the company was in compliance with the law.
Oh, and this applies to the US. Other countries may have similar laws.
The Magnuson-Moss Act is applicable here and it says - among many things - that the manufacturer must reveal the reason they are denying a warranty claim. In other words, they can NOT just deny the claim - and it would be a good idea if the manufacturer can back that up. They do NOT have to go into technical detail with the claimant as to why the reason applies - they just have to state it.
The next step is up to the person making the warranty claim. There are several courses of action, but ultimately it is the claimant who has the burden of proof. He has to have an expert who can testify that the reason stated is not applicable. Needless to say, the manufacturer will have an expert who can counter that.
Who needs to be convinced as to which expert is telling the truth is a Judge or a Jury. But that occurs far down the road. The manufacturer does NOT have to âproveâ that the reason stated is correct UNTIL it reaches that point.
In this case, the dealer has pointed to the aftermarket exhaust system as the reason to deny a warranty claim on the turbo. Clearly there is a connection - and enough of one that the manufacturer doesnât have to state anything more. If the car owner wants to pursue it further they need to be prepared to get an expert - and that costs money. The manufacturer probably already has in their employ, an expert who can connect the dots.
After all, itâs not like the dealer denied that claim because of the aftermarket paint job.
Yes. Turbo cars do not operate with boost all the time. They actually operate with no boost most of the time so the ECU fuel maps are created from the zero boost condition and up.
Plus the closed loop nature of fuel injection adjusts fuel volume based on oxygen sensor output⊠O2 sees rich, fuel injector pulse is reduced. O2 sees lean, pulse is increased.
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