rev up your engines, today I'm gonna show you how you can find out what's wrong
with a car when it has no trouble codes but it's acting up so I'm working on
this 2012 Honda CRV with an automatic transmission and it's got an oddball
problem it's been doing it for over a year sometimes when a customer drives
the car under light acceleration all things shutters then it goes away not a
check engine light is not so I hooked up my uber expensive stand tall
it's an autel that I just updated for Honda when I plugged it in it showed
that there was nothing wrong with the car except for a minor problem with the
airbag system which isn't gonna make the car judder while you're driving down the
road now check engine lights only go so far because if the data isn't more than
15 or 20 percent off and often won't triple code but this didn't have any
codes of any sort even the mechanic only dealer supported codes it didn't have
any at all now I had to drive this thing around about an hour and a half and
finally it did some of that juddering she wasn't making it up the whole car
we're a little bit and then it would smooth out and it would only do it under
light acceleration if you floor it it didn't do
it and it didn't do it hardly at all but I did feel it but having felt that it
felt like a transmission failure when I really go bad they shake they judder
inside the engine runs fine but then the transmission doesn't work right and when
it's trying to send power to the wheels instead of a nice continuous power under
light acceleration it was jerking all over the place one time when she was
driving with me in a car I felt at once and I thought she had run over something
in the road and the strut were worn and I said did that happen when you hit a bump she
says no you don't have to hit bumps so I drove on flat surfaces the whole time and
it did jutter on a flat surface so they've
nothing to do with the suspension and I did it more than one one side of my
house because it's hot as Hades out here and used today after a rain storm so I'm
going to my air conditioned house and my laptop I typed 2012 Honda CRV
technical service bulletins and look what popped up furnace service bulletin
17-040 vibration while driving their light acceleration after software
update now these TSB or technical service bulletins these days anybody
can access it on the Internet this thing is 2012 so it's eight years old it's not
on your warranty Honda was fixing these things under warranty for 60,000 miles
and I don't know how many years but it's long out of warranty I called up the
dealer just to seen it's well on a warrant now it said that sometimes you
can change the filter reprogram the computer and it'll fix the problem but
it's already been changed on this program he's already been gone and it
still does the jogger and she had that done last year and it still does the
jutter so it's gonna need a torque converter at a minimum now at the Honda
dealer replace the torque converter parts and labor was over a two thousand
dollar job no this cars only got 70,000 miles on it but she's been complaining
about this juddering for about a year a year and a half so it
really hasn't gotten much worse and she told me she's thinking about getting
another car but she doesn't want to do it right away so my response is going to
be hey look for $2000 since you've been driving it this way for a year and a
half and only does it once in a while just keep driving there what the heck I
don't know the customer with the same exact CRV told her the same thing and
she said I'm not gonna spend that kind of money and she just kept driving a thing
around she put another hundred thousand miles
on it and now it jutters a little bit more than I did before but it still goes down
the road so really it's not something that unless you're an absolute fanatic
would be worth spending $2,000 to fix something that judders every once in a
while only under light acceleration if it was a serious problem when you really
were accelerating fast on a highway started acting up could be dangerous
but this thing only did it under light acceleration whatever you Florida it
would just go and take off and with all the computer control crap on modern cars
most people that have brains are gonna realize there's some things that hey I'm
just gonna live with as long as they're not dangerous and it runs pretty good
most of the time it's not really worth putting all effort money into something
it's eight years old I mean obviously they have planned obsolescence written
all over this with sometimes they say well bring it in and we'll do the
software update because the original ones had some shifting problem
and they had to upgrade the software so that they'd work quite a bit better but
as they age hay and things wear some more the software updates can only do
something for the actual physical wearing of the transmission they can't
pick something perfectly when there are actually things like the torque
converter that's starting to wear out and let's say this was a serious problem
I contacted my transmission expert and he said that Scotty really if you're
gonna mess with this thing we would replace the torque converter but we'd
rebuild the whole transmission and it would generally go between twenty-five
and thirty-five hundred dollars we should make more sense if the stupid
thing actually did break and wasn't drivable you wanted to keep it
rebuild the whole thing correctly just don't replace one part of it but when
99% of the time it's working okay and a fancy scan computer like my hotel
doesn't pick up anything wrong and when I analyze the live data there's nothing
that's really off more than a few percentage points and like I said it's
got to go 15 to 20 percent off before it's gonna trip any codes my advice is
something like this would be just leave it alone if it's only gonna happen less
than one percent of the time it has been doing it for like a year and a half and
it doesn't seem to be getting any better or any worse I live with that too
because on this model CRV they really never have many transmission problems
this is a regular transmission with gears now if you're talking about the
later model CRVs that have the CVT transmissions quite a few of those have
had failures that's another story entirely but this pretty sure that yeah it is the
torque converter wants to spend 2 grand to fix something that works ok 99% of
the time and at least now you learned a good way to diagnose problems when there
is no check engine light no bad data that anybody can find start looking at
technical service bulletins because these are machines they're all made in
the same factory by the same robots and humans so if there's a known failure
that's the first thing you want to check and those technical service bulletins
give all that information and with the internet today it's very easy to search them
down, so if you never want to miss another one
of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell