When booking your car diagnostic appointment, you may be wondering what we will actually be doing? We often get asked the popular question:
“Isn’t Diagnostics just plugging in a machine?”
So in response to this question, simply the answer is no. There are many steps our diagnostic technicians take to diagnose your vehicle faults. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of exactly what diagnostics involves.
1. Beginning The Car Diagnostic Test: Gathering Information
Once you arrive here at Cedar Garage for your car diagnostic test, we will then ask you to run us through a detailed explanation of the problem you are experiencing. This is a crucial stage in the fault finding process. The more information we can gain about what has been going on, generally speaking, the quicker and less expensive the fault finding process becomes.
2. Road Test
The next step in the process is to recreate the same problems you are experiencing. This allows us to get a real understanding of what is going on. Our expert diagnostic technicians can often isolate a fault or get a good indication of where to begin investigating simply from the feel of the drive.
3. Fault Code Scan
This is the stage that is commonly misunderstood as “just plugging it into a machine”. However, it is a far more complex process than that. The best way to explain this step is to use the analogy of a doctors appointment. Your car is the patient and our technicians are the doctor.
A patient visits the doctor with back pain and explains the type of pain and where it hurts. But this is all the information they have. The doctor then has to perform a visual inspection in attempt to identify the issue. When this becomes inconclusive, the doctor begins to look at various scans such as an X-Ray, which could lead to an MRI scan. The doctor must do these scans in a logical order in order to get to the root of the cause of the problem.
Our technicians approach your vehicle in the same way, in a logical order to keep your costs to a minimum. We plug the computer in to your vehicle which effectively allows us to talk to the vehicle, giving us an indication of the area the fault lies.
4. Visual Inspection
Once the area of the fault has been identified, we visually inspect the components in that area. If there is nothing obviously wrong, we then continue to take the next steps.
5. Vehicle Serial Data
Inside the car is a control module, which is like the ‘brain’ of the car. We check the data from this module which may highlight data outside of the normal parameters. This can provide additional clues for the diagnosis.
6. Technical Service Bulletins
As cars are mass produced, often when a problem arises, it is common throughout that production line. We check the TSBs (Technical Service Bulletins) for any known faults in order to save time and money. You’d be surprised how often this has saved us hours of testing.
7. Basic System Checks
With the computer, we can initialise and activate certain components in the vehicle. By doing so, we can ensure they are working correctly, to further rule out potential issues.
8. Finishing The Car Diagnostic Test: Second Road Test
If a fault is found, diagnosed and fixed within the car diagnostic appointment, we re-road test to ensure the fault has been rectified. This also helps us to identify any further underlying issues.
What Makes Our Car Diagnostic Appointments Different?
We strongly believe in the motto ‘Test Not Guess’. This saves you and us, both time and money. It is important to us to correctly and logically get to the bottom of the fault, rather than replacing and fixing parts in hope that the problem will be solved. Hence why we are able to provide our customers with a first-time fix at an affordable price.
Whether it’s a strange noise, or something just doesn’t seem right. If you suspect your vehicle has a fault, book your car diagnostic appointment today online, or by giving us a call. Alternatively, find out more about our professional vehicle diagnostics.
