template

The car's stereo is the root cause of the engine running poorly!

I couldn't find where you wanted us to submit funny stories so I hope that this will reach the right place.

My best friend is a mechanic, and he seems to attract the nuttiest problems that cars ever experienced. One day a lady with a 93 Cutlass Supreme came into the garage. Problem; intermittent stalling. Hooking up the scan tool showed the oxygen and the MAP sensors were not responding properly. A quick replacement and they sent her off with an easy job well done. A week later, she comes back and says it's doing it again. My friend takes the car for a test drive and drives the car fairly hard to try to make it stall. Nothing. The scanner says that nothing is wrong. He gives the car to the lady and tells her that if it happens again to try to notice if there is anything out of the ordinary at that moment.

Two days later she's back and announces with certainty that it stalls when the radio is playing rock music! Knowing that the customer is always right, my friend takes the car for another test-drive with the radio blasting rock from 5 different stations. Nothing. The scan tool shows nothing either. Back in the garage my buddy is sitting in the driver seat, staring at the dash trying to figure out what's wrong, when he notices that the carpeting on the passengers side foot well was a little flatter than the rest. My buddy asks the lady if she listens to rock music often. She says that she only has it on when her son is in the car.

Final cause: The son was tapping his toe against the side of the foot well with the beat of the music. Normally not bad but where he was hitting is where the engines computer sits. They install a new computer and have the other one inspected. It turns out that the PCB was cracked but it stayed in contact most of the time, but when the son kicked it separated and shut the computer down stalling the engine. Since the computer was shut down so suddenly, no error codes were recorded.

This is a true story.

Back to the index page (top level)