Central Valley Classic Cars

You don’t have to be a mechanic to know that cars have changed quite a bit in the past forty years. Gone are the carburetors you tune yourself with nothing more than a screw driver and mechanical distributor points that have to be checked as often as you change your oil.

In their place are computer controlled components that can only be accessed by special pieces of equipment.

The good news is that cars today are both much more efficient and reliable (which is funny because I’ve never considered computers to be reliable in and of themselves). Cars are also smarter than they used to be. When something goes wrong the car often knows and can tell you specifically what the problem is.

Well it could if you were able to read a check engine light, something only a mechanic can do. At least that’s what most people think. The truth is you can buy what is called an OBDII reader for around 50 bucks. What this gets you is a palm sized device that’ll plug into most cars made after 1997 (and some from before) and will give you a code number for why that pesky check engine light is on. Or if you want even more info, for $150 you can buy a connection to hook up a laptop or other computer to your car and not just read trouble codes but get detailed information on all what’s coming through the sensors in you vehicle.

The last time I had a check engine light tested (and it will forever be the last time) I had to pay $160 just for the mechanic to read the trouble code. So one home reading from a troubled car will pay for the reader and then some.

In fact the mechanic I visited showed me the recorded OBDII code and then handed me a copy of the Alldata print out on the code. Alldata is an online service mechanics use to get service information on any car. This means that a shop doesn’t have to have experts in every different make of car they service. Instead they just buy a subscription to the Alldata site where they can get detailed info on whatever car they have in the shop at the moment. What makes this significant is I already had an account with Alldata. In addition to the thousand dollar a year access mechanics pay for, Alldata also provides something called AlldataDIY where an individual can subscribe just to one make and model of a car at a time (whatever car you have) for around $15 a year.

If you are familiar with Hayes or Chilton manuals you’re probably used to problems like the supplied pictures being of a different model/option set of the car you’re working on and finding the information as a guiding point but not the best step by step instructions for something you’ve never done before. They also suffer from being based on completely dismantling a car which is rarely the case when just fixing something yourself.

Alldata is nothing like that. I’ve never seen such well laid out diagrams and pictures. And the step by step instructions don’t assume that you know anything. So getting back to that mechanic I found I paid $160 for information I could have gotten myself if I had just had an OBDII reader back then. And really, with the car telling you what’s wrong and Alldata explaining how to fix it, there’s just no guess work.

Hold on, here’s a little history:

In order for cars’ emissions to meet state standards, the cars must be running properly. The need for this gave birth to the check engine light to let the owner know if something is wrong. For example, there are sensors in the car to check oxygen levels in the car both before and after the catalytic converter to make sure the exhaust fumes are sufficiently cleaned. But having these senors also allows the vehicle to monitor its combustion process for efficiency by checking the amount of air coming into the car with the amount of oxygen left over after combustion in the exhaust. And having multiple sensors, the car can also determine if there’s a fault with one of them. So an OBDII code can tell you if you car is running rich or lean for some reason or if there’s just a faulty sensor. Further because of the myriad of sensors it can also narrow down a problem to a specific area, sometimes down to a specific cylinder or other component.

With Alldata and an OBDII read you can find these problems out for yourself regardless of if you plan to work on the car yourself. It can empower you to know a mechanic won’t be pulling something on you and to know whether you really need to see a mechanic right away or not. Sometimes those lights indicate nothing more than a gas cap that isn’t secure. No one needs to pay a mechanic $200 to fix that.

And if you’re like me you’ll also enjoy hooking a laptop up to your car and seeing all kinds of information about fuel consumption, engine rpm, temperature, air flow and ignition timing plot on a graph while you drive for no reason other than being a little geeky and thinking its cool.