rev up your engines sometimes convenience is not worth the price sure it's great
if you got a remote starter you push a button you're living a buffalo start
your car in a driveway so it can warm up the snow just will melt off it'll be
warm inside but if you're a car did not come from the factory with one of those
remotes starting systems on it please do not attempt to either install on
yourself or have someplace install it on your car if you're tempted not to listen
to me just go look at a kit go to some electronics store look at the kit you
are going to see wires everywhere then it has to be connected to your car they
never give you the directions of each specific model they say generic stuff
like this goes to the power wire this goes to the starter wire
Yatta Yatta Yatta start looking at all the wires on the car especially when you
go under the hood and you start messing with all the wiring that's in there yeah
look at that bundle of wires there you'll soon discover that hooking one of these kits
off is an insanely complex job and one which even for a good mechanic can take
hours in hours I've seen people leave them off two days later the guys don't
have them hooked up right yet I have to deal with the other end of this stuff
somebody puts one in cars to be towed to me cause either right away or a few
weeks or months later the car doesn't start or starts running poorly your
electrical system has various wires they have various amount of power going to
them it's very complicated it's designed by engineers now if you bought a car and
it was built at the factory with one okay yes it's extremely complicated but
actual engineers designed it for that car for that wiring system for that
remote that you get when you buy the car new but these are not systems you're
patching them into the car no one really tests them on all different cars maybe
they work great in a Ford but you got a Toyota you don't want to mess with those
things believe me I had a customer he wanted one in his car
so he wants in one of these car stereo places cuz they got a big sign we
install remote starting systems for your car now yes this is an extreme case but
I've seen it with my own eyes they're working on the car
the dash started on fire burnt a whole bunch of the car up but at least luckily
for my customer the car stereo place was a national chain and they did have
insurance I ended up forking out over five thousand dollars to fix that fire
that they started it's rather funny that although they are a remote starting
system for your car one of the biggest problems they have is when you put one
in some point in time your car won't start and I mean it won't start with the
remote then I won't either start with a key sometimes because one of the worst
things you can do is to put one system on top of another system even a simpler
thing like a car burglar alarm I've had customers didn't know that much about
cars and they thought it all I'll put a good burglar system on my car so they
buy one of these systems and either they put it on or they pay one of those
stereo places to install the alarm system on their car but they didn't
realize how I already had an alarm system from the factory almost all cars
today come that way an aftermarket alarm system on top of the system that was in
the car it went haywire and unfortunately for
them it worked okay for months the battery went dead then one
got another battery when you put that batter in car would start and so they
towed it over to me and I said well you got a problem with your anti-theft
system I said you got the little clicker for it
they have the little clicker but that didn't help it happened to be a
Nissan I said well where's your remote for turning an alarm off for the Nissan
and they said oh I don't know I bought the car used I never got one of those I
just used the key and then this system that they put on it so it turned out of
course still had the original Nissan anti-theft system that had this other
system on top of it you mix those together sometimes when you change the
battery the system has to start over it gets totally confused because it sees
that there's this factory alarm system but then there's another system that's
patched on top of that in the case of that one I just
disconnected the aftermarket alarm system that was put on then the car
started up fine and sure if you don't what something stolen
great you're talking about electronics you can't patch one system on top of
another system I even had a customer that had three of
them had the original one had an anti-theft system then it had one of
these remote starters just as put on top of it and man when that thing broke
I had to disconnect a whole bunch of stuff just to get it to start because
when I was young ganic that stuff was easy to do they had an ignition system
with power the carburetor was mechanical it just pumped fuel and mechanically the
only thing you had to do show off the ignition system in a car wouldn't start
but today everything's run by computer even the starters run by computer the
ignition system the fuel injection system and if you start tapping into
those wires even something like an LED that would use just a few milli amps of
power is enough to make those things go squirrelly at times and believe me it's
hard enough pretty good mechanic like me to fix a factory remote starting system
that came with the car that at least I go to my all data system I can look stuff
up I can see where the wires go I can trace it if somebody has one of these
aftermarket systems put on generally I don't get any information especially if
the system was made in China I mean sometimes the English doesn't even make
sense on those things I've had wiring diagrams from that made no sense at all
of course even worse things were Chinese characters hi no idea what those met and
if you do have one of these aftermarket systems hooked up and it breaks a lot of
times you're gonna find a hard time finding anybody who will even work on
I'm an open mind a guy helped out my customers and when I get a pain thing
like that I just say to them look this aftermarket system is insanely
complicated I have no idea what they've done to it you don't have a wiring
diagram for it I just say look I know how your original wiring system is I say
I can look that up on my all data and what I will do is I'll disconnect all
the wires that they've hooked up and I will reconnect them all to the factory
specifications they still make cars logically that all the wires are
color-coded so if you have a black with a white stripe wire and then
there's stuff hooked to it and then further down the line there's another
wire hooked to the black with the white stripe on it you disconnect all the
stuff that they added and just splice the black with the white to the black
with the white again and that's back to where it started from and just a general
tip for anybody who's planning on putting any add on electronic accessories
to their vehicle here's my advice see this big battery it's got huge wires
on it right go through the extra trouble of wiring your new devices directly to
your battery with their own wires with their own few systems and if it's
something heavy-duty with its own relay pack to so it can
take that power because the plain truth about modern cars it is they're always
trying to save money building up so they're gonna use the smallest gauge
wire with the thinnest amount of copper in it that they can the system is made
that it works perfectly fine the way it was designed yeah
if it's a Fiat or something then it's even designed but a well-made car
Toyota Honda for do something it's designed with wiring that works
perfectly fine but generally a wiring system is pretty close to its maximum
capability the way it was built and if you start adding more power to those
wires it's a recipe for disaster here's an example that wasn't that big
of a deal but it proves my point not a customer wanted to put brighter
lights on his Honda so you want bought these super-bright light bulbs and stuck
them in headlights a man they were certainly bright but one day he came to me and
he said I turned my headlights on a little switch and after a while that
switch starts to get kind of hot well the reason was getting hot is because
those bulbs took so much power that that switch had to send more power through
and it originally did so I told them hey if you really like the lights here's
what we can do we can just run a new switch system for your headlights we get
a nice switch heavy duty one 20 amps switch and ran the power directly from the battery
to the switch and then from the switch to a relay and the relay sent power to
the headlights know most people doing a modify car like that
so really don't put really brighter headlights in if your headlight switch
is starting to get hot go back to the other ones but if you really want them
you can just rewire the whole system because realize can take a lot of power
the power goes from the battery to the relay and sits there then when you turn
your switch on that energizes the reel I saw the power goes from the battery to
the relay and then directly to the headlights the heavy-duty power isn't
going through the headlight switch anymore so you don't have to worry about
getting hot when you're dealing with these remote starting systems they have
so many wires to go to so many different places you'd have to put relays all
over the place and you'd have to have a guy who really understood the wiring of
your car because it's too complicated in a modern car with all those tiny little
computer waters you got a remote starter who knows these days what's gonna happen
with all the electromagnetic interference and wireless devices
somebody might be on their phone messing with something your car might start up
who knows I remember years ago when I was going to school
I had a friend lives out in the country and they found out that
when they got on their CB radio at a certain frequency it would open this
guy's automatic garage opener so when people got drunk they put the CB radios
on and they'd opened up his garage just roll laughing and now this is an extreme
example but just a short time ago a guy was killed he was from New York City was
21 years old he was killed by a remote starting system Canada in his Lexus it
was an aftermarket one that was put in it wasn't the factory was an aftermarket
one and he was standing between the guys car in another car walking out of the
street the guy with the lexus pushed his remote starter the car started and somehow
drove into him and it was crushing his leg people tried to push it off but it
kept pushing it in the guy ended up dying so I mean that's no laughing
matter the aftermarket remote system killed
somebody so if you're thinking about putting one of these aftermarket remotes
starting systems in your car place listen to Scotty don't do it who knows
you might even say someone's life, so if you never want to miss another one
of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell