Those are not disasters and can be fixed for relatively little money.
CARDIOGRAPH MACHINE SOFTWARE
These days, it's not uncommon for electronically controlled automatic transmissions to have problems related to software or solenoids. Transmissions can fail for a number of reasons. The bad news? It's no longer connected to the wheels. The lowdown: The good news is that your engine is still running. "Did you notice when you put your car in Drive, it doesn't move? We figured out why."
Those are, respectively, expensive, really expensive, and you may wind up saying, "I guess I won't be retiring for another year." 4.
CARDIOGRAPH MACHINE CRACKED
The most common results of frequent or severe overheating are a blown head gasket, a cracked head or a cracked block. If your car overheats badly, or frequently, you can do serious damage. It could be a leaky hose, a stuck thermostat or a loose clamp. The lowdown: If you catch an engine overheating early enough and take action, you can get by cheaply. "When you saw the paint on your hood was starting to blister, did that give you any kind of hint that you might have been overheating?" Then all the expensive parts that are attached to the piston get bent or broken. Water is not compressible, so when the piston tries to squeeze the water, the piston loses. The air is compressible, so when the piston squeezes everything, the pressure just goes up. Normally, your engine's cylinder contains air and droplets of fuel. The lowdown: There are certain places water shouldn't be - like inside your iPhone, on your original Matisse watercolor or inside your engine's cylinders. "That 4-foot-deep puddle that you tried to cross? You sucked some of it into your engine's cylinders." What happens to your old engine? A recycler will finish the melting job, and the engine will be transformed into thousands of tiny Bic lighters. Instead, the engine needs to be replaced with a used or remanufactured engine. Unfortunately, there's no way to fix a seized engine. The lowdown: A "seized" engine means that your lubrication failed (that is, you had insufficient oil or oil pressure), and the expensive moving parts of your engine scraped each other into a heated glob of useless scrap metal. The Smithsonian wants to put it on display."Ĭost: $3,000 for a used engine, up to $10,000 for a remanufactured engine. What used to be aluminum pistons, steel cylinder walls and an iron crankshaft is now a 900-pound garden sculpture. "The reason your engine stopped running is that it's now a melted mass of amalgamated metals. We do that all the time."īut there are some things you never want to hear, over the phone, from your mechanic.
Photo courtesy of Mark Sardella creative commons
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