I took over general maintenance on his car about a year ago and found that the car seemed designed to be thrown away at 100k miles. It now has 130k miles. The design philosophy seemed to be to assign the design to five teams who were not allowed to talk to each other, as long as the subgroups mostly fit together on the assembly line. The approach to changing many bulbs is not easy.
Today his car started, sputtered and stalled, but the engine kept running. He was able to take it home, let it cool down, and take it to a place where he could check the codes. As you might guess, the codes indicate a new transmission control module, abbreviated as TPM or TPU. I spent a few hours today trying to figure out the removal, replacement and recalibration (we assume R, R & RI) for the TPM and whatever else goes along with it.
Holy Mother of Mush Marble! First, a new TPM must be found. It looks like there are five or more part numbers for the same car, and most are out of stock. They range in price from $150 for a shot to $580 for a JATCO through an N*** merchant. The TCM seems easy to reach and R&R, but then it needs to be calibrated. And that requires access to N*** I don’t have a website or electronics, but they definitely stuck with me.
Sadly, he admitted to the original dealer sales and service departments that the CVT fluid is a lifetime component. I’m afraid replacing the TCM would be like putting a band-aid on a cherry bomb. Besides the CVT, other things are wrong:
- It is haunted. The instrument cluster has a mind of its own. The temperature varies randomly from navel to hot, never in between. I put in a radiator cap that contains a thermometer so he can tell what’s real. The fuel gauge is just as random, but not in sync with the other gauges.
- None of the steering wheel buttons do anything anymore.
- Door controls are intermittent.
This is mostly a joke. But I wonder if any of the rest of us have similar stories, one way or another.
