To be fair, I forgot an important bit of context. I was on vacation abroad when my car broke on a Friday afternoon. Our hotel room was only available until Saturday morning as everything was booked out for the weekend because of a huge event in the city. They asked me just to get a first indication and not waste time with random troubleshooting, so that I could get home and get everything checked completely with a more relaxed schedule.
From my view, it was a sensible thing to do. But the literal translation on their report they showed me was just “the warning light is lit” - not even which (though that is quite obvious, when you start the engine)
To be fair ‘warning light is lit’ is all the mechanic needs to know in a lot of circumstances.
Most of the time, the warning light comes on because the engine’s computer has logged an error code. The mechanic just plugs his code reader in to find out what the code is and then looks up what it means. And ~90% of the time, the engine’s computer does a pretty good job of telling the mechanic what’s wrong.
(For example, if it gives a code for “Cylinder #4 misfire”, then the mechanic knows he should probably check the spark plug and coil for cylinder #4. And if those seem fine, get out the compression tester and test the compression of cylinder #4. And without any additional information from the customer besides ‘warning light is lit’, that’s probably enough for him to find the cause of the problem.)
ah well, then that is them being stubborn and being unable to troubleshoot.
To be fair, I forgot an important bit of context. I was on vacation abroad when my car broke on a Friday afternoon. Our hotel room was only available until Saturday morning as everything was booked out for the weekend because of a huge event in the city. They asked me just to get a first indication and not waste time with random troubleshooting, so that I could get home and get everything checked completely with a more relaxed schedule.
From my view, it was a sensible thing to do. But the literal translation on their report they showed me was just “the warning light is lit” - not even which (though that is quite obvious, when you start the engine)
To be fair ‘warning light is lit’ is all the mechanic needs to know in a lot of circumstances.
Most of the time, the warning light comes on because the engine’s computer has logged an error code. The mechanic just plugs his code reader in to find out what the code is and then looks up what it means. And ~90% of the time, the engine’s computer does a pretty good job of telling the mechanic what’s wrong.
(For example, if it gives a code for “Cylinder #4 misfire”, then the mechanic knows he should probably check the spark plug and coil for cylinder #4. And if those seem fine, get out the compression tester and test the compression of cylinder #4. And without any additional information from the customer besides ‘warning light is lit’, that’s probably enough for him to find the cause of the problem.)