Sunday April 15, 2007

Conclusion, not resolution.

I recently posed an automotive puzzler, inviting readers to guess what was wrong with my RAV4. Unfortunately, the car's "check engine" light came on two days before the service call and Toyota wanted $350 to replace the arcing spark plug cables before they would proceed to diagnose the original problem. Since my replacement vehicle is due in a few weeks, I declined service so we'll never know what the problem was. Frustrating, since the check engine light had been going on and off for the last six months or more (reason never determined by Toyota, I though I heard today that some RAV4's have this problem) and it is probably not at all related to the more interesting problem described in my earlier post.

For what it's worth, when I initially described the problem in detail to the service person, he thought it might be a faulty coolant sensor interacting with a good sensor in a feedback loop. Said he'd seen something like this before.