rev up your engines today I'm gonna talk about whether you should get rid of a
car that you have or whether you should continue owning it and taking care of it
and I've got a perfect example here my customer here
she owns a ten-year-old Infiniti she's asking me should I keep this car or
should I get something else is it gonna give me a lot of problems I can still
drive it a few years now if you've been watching me anything like the time
you'll know I'll say don't go buy used infiniti g37 or any high-end infiniti
because they can become money pits as they age but here I'm gonna give an
honest evaluation of the car to my customer okay we climb inside and we see
it's got ninety two thousand three hundred and two miles on it that's got
all the bells and whistles and she said they all work perfectly fine she's never
had any problems with them and you have a lot of trims cracking the places and
the other trim is fading away coating on the plastic is wearing off but if we go
into the back it's immaculate no problems there because hey she drives the
car by herself nobody else nobody is using it we got to the passenger side hey that's
immaculate too that's not faded away that's not cracked
she just drives the car by yourself and we check in the trunk pop it open
everything's clean the seals clean she told me it's never been wrecked and it
certainly looks like it never has been and when we pull the hood release and check
under the hood it's got the ultra reliable v6 engine in it
it doesn't burn any oil or lose any coolant and being the original owner she
hasn't had any major problems the biggest thing she did was have the front
struts change because it was bouncing too much so it's got a history of being
a pretty good cars never been wrecked but you never know so I'm getting my
fancy scan tool and we'll hook it up just plug it under the dash it goes
problems can't hide from these machines we just pressed Diagnostics then
infinity and away we go smart machine it knows what it's doing it's already read the
whole thing and now we scan it auto scans and now it's scanning now it's found
two problems one with the body control
three with the sonar system so start with a body controller module that's got a
a code of u1000 which is relatively common with an older car this is a lost
communication code of the main computer to any of the modules often though lose
communication once in a while with one or the other runs fine she hasn't had
any problems with it I see this all the time if I had a customer who's buying
this vehicle and it didn't work right didn't have that code I'd say walk away
because that lost communication can be a serious problem but when they run
perfectly fine I see it all the time in cars now it also has a code for the sonar
system so we'll see what that is it's lost communication with three of the
sonar sensors interestly enough each one of the three was seen exactly thirty
nine times it records how many times it happens so all these codes are related
I'm assuming that the main computer has the you 1,000 code of loss of
communication because it's lost communication with some of these two but
sonar systems for back and up and for warning you're getting too close that's
typical as these things age hey as long as you use your eyes and ears and drive
normally none of these systems are gonna save you anyway and as they age they can
cost a fortune to fix and most people like this lady just ignore them I'm
gonna check all the live data that gives me so much information I don't know what
kind of shape this vehicle is in overall within a few minutes and as you can see
man there is a lot of data I analyzed it as I scroll through it this particular
system is color coded so if they're bad they'll be either yellow or red or
they'll be highlighted and so just being a normal color for example the map
sensor data that's pretty spot-on for this vehicle
I can't even test it by putting it in drive and now I'm going to turn off the
AC that you'd make the MAP sensor drop watch turned it off and it dropped just
like it's supposed to see the injector pulse is good the mass airflow sensor is
good there is so much information that I can go through that shows me what kind
of shape the engine is in the transmission is in its wild, alternator is
working there it is thirteen point seven six volts without of your nothing going
on the hood of the car so actually the machine tells me that the
vehicle is in excellent shape the transmission has no problems the engine
has no problems the electronic system other than that stupid lost
communication which is probably the sonar system that's in tip-top shape now
I did notice something while I walking I could smell a little smoldering during then when
I come here I can smell a tiny bit of smoldering
this is a v6 engine ninety something thousand miles the valve cover gaskets
are seeping a tiny amount of oil which then smolders it's no big deal
I seen cars go years this way with no real problems at all
it's not even dripping on the ground now if it's dripping on the ground making a
mess yeah it's time to change them out but as these things age a lot of them
let just a little bit of oil come out of it it doesn't really mean anything
I checked the tires and they're wearing evenly you have any scallops either the
front one score the back ones and of course now I'm gonna take it for a road
test and a highway see it handles at high speed but I drove it around here
just around the block and man this thing is fast I can see why people buy them
they're extremely fast vehicles the owner may be a little old lady but she's
more like the little old lady from Pasadena who wants to put her foot the
pedal the metal every once in a while and well step on the gas
goes like stink and also handles like a dream true this car is in excellent shape
so all in all considering that it shifts like a dream and runs like a dream doesn't
burn oil doesn't use any coolant has no serious trouble cold the data is all
good I'm gonna tell my customer keep the car it might go years more and in
this particular case even though I say don't buy these used infinities if a
customer had brought me this car and said should I buy this car not and after
I checked it out I'd say if you don't pay too much money for it it could be a
good car but of course she already owns the car it's been paid for years ago so
what the heck she might get another four or five years of reasonably trouble-free
driving with us thing as the saying goes better the devil you know than the one
you don't, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos
remember to ring that Bell