Reduce to engine power light p1516 p2101 flat rate mechanic here today and today we're
gonna go over what you should do if you get the reduce engine power light on
your dash or p1516 or p2101 This video is gonna be jam-packed with a ton of information so
be sure to stay tuned to the end I'm gonna show you what you should do and
couple of things you can try before you spend money on repairs and we're also going to be
taking the throttle body apart to find out why it failed to, be sure to hit that thumbs up
button guys and subscribe to the Flat Rate Mechanic okay so reduced engine power
light is coming on in your dash or a reduced engine power message this is
most common in Chevy vehicles Chevy Malibus, Chevy Silverado or Chevy Cobalt
Chevy Cruze. I've seen them into all these vehicles
Cadillacs, Pontiac, Buick so definitely a big issue with GM's if you know of any
other vehicles that have that check power or reduce engine power light or
reduce engine power message on the dash leave it in the comments below or
if your vehicle has it just I'll leave the make and model below so we can see
where these are failing stuff like that but basically the first thing you want
to do basically where this problem lies is in the throttle body itself so
there's some kind of correlation issue where this throttle plate is and what the
computer is receiving so what it does is it's gonna put your car into a fail safe
mode or a limp mode where it's only gonna let you accelerate to a certain
point and that's it so you're probably not gonna be able to go very fast but
what you can do is pullover shut your vehicle off and restart it in
most cases is gonna go back into the normal Drive mode as long as there's no
serious issues with this it was just correlation issues that happen once you
shut the car off restart it and you should be able to get home or get to a
shop just by doing that I want you to do that the first thing you're going to
want to do is I'm just clean the throttle body up you know basically if you're not
familiar with a throttle body this is what controls mount air that goes into
your motor is directly linked to your throttle pedal
electronically no more throttle cable like the old days
and just follow your air intake boot that's where it comes that's where your
air intake air filter all that stuff connects right into here where your air
comes in so just connect that open it up take us toothbrush and just some brake
clean or some carb clean go ahead and open this thing up here and get it
all nice and cleaned out inside of there and then just let it do a throttle relearn itself if
you have a small code reader you can go ahead and clear the codes p1516 and p2101 code the light by yourself if
you don't I'll leave a link below we can get it a little mini and held code reader on
Amazon or even a blue drive I believe makes a nice one that connects to your
smartphone I'll leave a link to that as well but yeah go ahead and get cleaned
up and the throttle body is easy to take off I like I like taking them off if I'm doing it for
a customer I'll take them right off and clean them up really good reinstall it
let go through the relearning process on Chevy's you do not need any kind of scan
tool for it to do the idle relearn it will do all by itself just by starting
it and let it idle for a few minutes some in case you may need to drive it for a
little bit in either case no scan tool needed there are some vehicles
that you will need a scan tool if you run into this problem I know Infiniti
and Nissan is definitely one of them I will leave a link to that video in this
card up here I show you how to relearn that throttle body. well what I wanted to
basically go check in this video is I got this is one of a very high failure
rate on the Chevy truck this came off a Chevy Silverado. this had already
been cleaned once and the customer even came back and they were still having
issues with it so I just kind of wanted to take the mystery out of what is
failing on these and I've taken apart before this one I started a take apart I
haven't completely inspected it yet but I took a couple clips off there's a seal
that goes here they're relatively simple if it needs to be replaced you can buy
these as a unit and I believe you can also just buy this piece and this piece
just consists of basically your throttle position sensor which relays where this
position is back to the computer and that's usually what fails and I believe
you can buy just these tps. if I can find a link for that I'll leave it below in the
description as well so I don't go ahead these clips just pop off and where it's
safety glasses they go flying what we have here is this is actually the
throttle position sensor itself let's get this off of here now I had already
had this apart once typically this steel piece is gonna be this is
gonna be kinda like this the steel piece is gonna be here and these are not meant
to be taken apart so if you think you're gonna take this apart and put it back
together and put it back in your vehicle you're probably not gonna be very
successful because these throttle bodies have like a molded molded plastic around here I'm
not saying it's impossible but if you're gonna take yours apart chances are you
may not be able to get it working again what you have here is a resistor as
this as your throttle moves it's gonna vary the signal to the PCM letting
it know what position that throttle is in um what we have here is your motor we
got the two pins I power the motor through the cover here and then we got
the gear that actually activates the throttle so as you can see here all this
seems to be working for a sleek line nice and smooth I don't see any damage
to the gears at all I don't really see sometimes if the motors start and go bad
you'll see some brush material or some blackness around here I don't see any of
that without actually testing this just visually looking everything appears to
be working pretty good you can see the arm that controls the throttle position
sensor itself is moving properly so while this seems to be functioning okay
what I would do next and I have already done I'm not gonna do it on
the video here is I'm actually going to make sure and I mean it's possible very
unlikely but possible that the molded circuitry inside this plastic housing
can go bad or has high resistance so what you can do is you can actually own
those out through these pins coming out through here to here and then just make
sure you have low resistance on all these terminals and same goes for the
motor circuit here if that all checks out good then we would move on to the
next thing here which would be just inspecting this actual potentiometer
here our throttle position sensor and trying to figure out why the same failed
and you can see you can see right off the bat it's got heavy we're down at the
closed throttle position and then at the open throttle position, there's
not nearly as much which makes sense because most your throttle range is gonna
be down in this area but um from what I've seen in the past that
that's some pretty heavy were there's some scoring yeah you can yeah on
the outer one you can see this some pretty you know it's starting to
starting to wear into the material there so that can definitely poses a
problem but where I usually rarely see the problems is in these fingers and
you get a good a few on that yeah and it does look like we definitely from the
ones I've inspected in the past you can definitely see some wearing uneven
wearing and I see there's one finger there it actually looks like it's bent
back a little so these are pretty inconsistent with a nice compared to a
nice new unit so that's all that's happened on this one is this throttle
position sensor the potentiometer is worn to the point where is just sending
a faulty signal back to the computer causing the reduced engine power light and p1516 p2101 would be my guess on this one here so if
that's the case on your house and like I said in most cases that is a case and if
you can just buy this unit here you can save yourself money rather than having
to replace this whole throttle assembly but definitely, want to clean
I said cleaner in good' we can do it on the vehicle off the vehicle
and then just let the vehicle do an idle relearn it clear the codes if you can and drive it
in a lot of cases that's gonna take care of it so I mean it's also a good idea to
as you're removing this throttle body to make sure you have no corrosion or moisture
inside these connector any kind of moisture corrosion conditions can cause
faulty signal going back to the computer as well I believe I also have another
video on cleaning these throttle plates along with the reduced engine power
light and p1516 p2101 I'll leave a link in that card up here and I'll try and leave a couple
links to a few more videos that may help you out in the video description below
thanks you guys watching this video if you haven't already subscribed to the
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for watching guys until next time flat rate mechanic
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