My daughter away at college reported to me that her check engine late came on, the speedometer was acting crazy and the car wasn’t shifting right and wouldn’t get up to speed.
I had her take it to a shop and they replaced the speed sensor and a half shaft for $530. she got 5 miles away and the car did the exact same thing.
she took it right back to the shop but they can’t get it in because they had other appointments. While I await them to get it back in for the “new diagnosis” I thought I would look for some suggestions as to what might be wrong
Any ideas on what it could be???
An auto parts store like Auto Zone or Advance Auto have code readers that will pull up the codes that caused the CEL to come on. When you have those codes, post them back on here to get a better understanding of what’s really going on.
It would be best to get the actual codes, but a safe assumption would seem to be that it was one of the codes related to the vehicle’s speed sensor (VSS) - that makes sense with the symptoms.
The problem is likely an all too common one - a code comes up that relates to the VSS so the sensor itself gets replaced without carefully diagnosing the actual issue. E.g. one general VSS code is just P0500 - VSS malfunction. But that can just come from a loose or broken wire. Too often people replace the part without diagnosing - so the part gets replaced but the problem remains.
Anyway…if you can get the actual code, post it. Either way I would keep after this shop - they should be willing to do a lot at this point without too much more $$ (at least one would hope).
I kept on the shop, they finally got it back into look at it. They found the problem. The plug to the speed sensor they had just replaced came unplugged causing the problem to reoccur.
I am glad that the car is now fixed, but does the explanation sound fishy? That perhaps they found the real cause of the problem and didn’t want to tell me they had misdiagnosed it initially.Resulting in an unnecessary repair? Or am I just being overly suspicious because I have been ripped off before by other shops?
They were actually pretty nice to deal with other than being a bit slow to refix the problem.They were apologetic that the car had to be brought back as well.
thanks for your posts - mechanicdad
If the connector wasn’t seated all the way to where the retainer clip was holding it in place, then yes, this can and does happen. I suspect if this were the original problem, it would not have re-occurred, since they would have made sure it was seated and clipped before returning to you. But, if they did the proper work, it is easy to miss a little detail like this as you reattach things.