2011_smart_fortwo_is_seriously_not_shifting_right_what_the_car_wizard_finds_will¶

4 excerpts.

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youtube.com/car_wizard/2011_smart_fortwo_is_seriously_not_shifting_right_what_the_car_wizard_finds_will · p. 1 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

welcome back to the wizard shop it's time for another smart car video and possibly a new transmission or is it let's get started [Music] isn't this car really cute it's small it's good on gas it's actually really small i think this car would be great for la atlanta miami new york city some of the big cities where you need to get downtown and zip around and in and out of tight spaces this car is perfect but out here in kansas when you have open highways for literally hundreds of miles it doesn't make as much sense but are still a cool car you could still own one around here it's just i think it really is in its element in a large city this one's all the way from the kansas city area and the customer is concerned and actually mentally prepared that the transmission is toast on this thing i almost think they're ready to go ahead and just put a new one in it but the theme of this video today is you guys need to be so careful when you take your car to a shop do not tell them you're ready for a new transmission because guess what they'll sell you one whether you need it or not i see this so much and it's sad it's sad that mechanic shops have come to finding a good one is kind of like finding hen's teeth it's it's sad luckily they can trust us here we're going to find out today does it really need a new transmission first of all let's take a look around it and then we'll get this thing in the air and see what we see on the transmission move over wizard oh yeah it says move over on the tag i guess when they're cruising down the highway they want your big giant truck out of the way well i want you out of my way too out of the camera they want to see the car okay let me get out of the way so there's the cute front end of this 2011 smart 42 passion this is the passion level they have different levels and you would think if you're uninitiated to these cars that underneath this panel is the engine and you would be incorrect all there is there is the brake master cylinder radiator air conditioning some things like that as far as the condenser and such this panel actually pops off and i'm not going to pop it off today because we're not needing to look under there the engine is actually in the back let's go ahead and take a look around it has cute little wheels mrs wizard they are tiny little donuts do you like the ground effects package or whatever you call that the side swipes those are some nice decals they've got added i don't know if that's stock or not i know the black down here is i don't know about that but it looks pretty good though they actually had trouble when they brought it up here getting it on a trailer because it's so small as you can see here this is the passion package and we'll take three steps and we'll be to the back literally three steps here's a little air intake for the engine that's in the back or it may not be for the engine i would imagine it is but some sort of an air intake there and we'll go around to the back here's definitely some intake for the engine some air vents right there i'll go ahead and open this hatch okay wizard just said the engine's back here it is under this panel underneath this panel here is where the engine is i'll undo this thumb screw here a little one liter engine there it is guys tiny tiny little thing there's our air filter here's our intake duct there's the intake down there alternator you can see it everything's in the back kind of like a beetle so but there's not much going on in here we'll go ahead and close this up and you're doing that wizard uh one thing that could be nice about working on this car is you can always just sit here on the tailgate and work on the engine you could built-in chair you literally could just get some tunes going and get whatever done you need to get done all right well that's a tour of the engine bay or the engine hatch or whatever you want to call it

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youtube.com/car_wizard/2011_smart_fortwo_is_seriously_not_shifting_right_what_the_car_wizard_finds_will · p. 2 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

and just so you know size matters once you go around to this side we got the same cool little swoop going on and one thing that's really interesting is eighty percent of the length of this car is the door there's a small section here and a little small section up there maybe not 80 but at least 70. so we open the door up you can see we have some things apart and we'll show you what's going on there in a minute but most of this is the door let's go ahead and get this thing up in the air and see what we see on the transmission so again if you're looking at the front of the car for the transmission you're in the wrong spot but one thing to notice is how tiny thin these front wheels are the rear are a little thicker but it's almost like a motorcycle it's very very thin but that's for fuel economy we'll take a look here the brakes look nice and thick the struts are dry sway bar link is good not a whole lot going on there everything's small brakes are good here sway bar link is good there strut is dry and there's our tiny little tire again if you look up through here in this ventilation you can see that there's the radiator condenser the power steering rack which is electric all the things going on there there's no engine there some under body paneling and then we arrive to the back which has a large trailing arm which is the suspension looks like a rainbow mrs wizard it does it's definitely an interesting support system so these are a manual transmission but it's kind of like an automatic you put it into gear you don't shift you don't do the things yourself it has an actuator here it does all the shifting and everything for you some of the issues you can run into this sensor right here that's got two green wires is a position sensor an rpm says there's very various different sensors all through on the sides there can have broken wires or actually damaged sensors like we've seen before on some of these or the actuator itself but these look all intact everything looks good the starters in good shape i don't see any leaks or any cracks or damage let's check this wheel our cv boot is good inner and outer look at that spring mrs wizard it's so tiny man you can make kids toys out of that it's so little i can actually squeeze it with my hands there's a little shock there's a kind of like a tie rod a solid one there's our nice boot there a nice boot there look at the little oil filter mrs wizard everything is just so tiny it's like an egg like a little goose egg everything looks good over there nice dry shock i don't see any serious issues going on under here so the next thing we really need to do to see what's going on is we need to hook up our autel scan tool and see what's going on and i'll go get magic mike and have him show you what we found so let's get this thing on the ground and get that going this is magic mike you guys have seen him several times in videos he's been here for quite a while what like two years now a little over two years now yeah yeah doing really good work he's actually working on the smart car and actually has found out what's wrong but we're gonna work through and show you guys what we found and he go ahead and get this thing set up i want to show you guys the codes all right it's on it is on it said it was on good all right so you can see from right here we've got quite a few different fault codes and a few different control modules and for today's purposes i'm going to go into the sprint shift control module because that was the issues that they were complaining about they were saying they were having some hard shifting issues and they're also getting three dashes on the cluster where the drive symbol should be so when i first scan this car you can see that it's got all these codes listed as stored none of them is current and that had me caught off guard for a little bit i was thinking okay well maybe this was a low battery issue perhaps they'd let it sit for too long voltage dropped too low shut the can down but after i started it up and drove

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youtube.com/car_wizard/2011_smart_fortwo_is_seriously_not_shifting_right_what_the_car_wizard_finds_will · p. 3 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

it i noticed that the fault codes immediately came back so i started diving a little deeper you can see we've got no or incorrect can message from the esp engine control module and the electronic selector module when i went into those control modules i found that they were all having issues communicating with the sprint shift control module which is what i'm looking at now and that told me somebody somewhere is bringing down the can and i knew that's where i had to start okay so knowing that i have a wiring issue or an open circuit somewhere i started taking apart the car knowing where the wiring was going to be at i started taking apart the center console and that's when i found my first issues okay so we'll show that here in a little bit what we found there but as you can see these codes really don't relate to anything that would say there's a major transmission failure there's servo issues or or with the selector module or anything like that it's just saying i can't speak with it it's not saying it's ruined it's just saying i can't talk with it so i'll go ahead and let you get back to work and we'll take it i'll show them what you found here on the wiring and we'll show you guys what the solution is going to be sounds good all right so here we are we've arrived at finding out what's exactly wrong with this car we're at a moment right now where if we were an unscrupulous shop we know the customer is already prepared to buy a new transmission it shifts really hard something's wrong with the transmission in their mind they think this transmission is toast it's done we need to go ahead and budget a new transmission something's really wrong with this one i could easily call the customer up and say yep you need a new transmission but it doesn't there could be thousands and thousands of dollars wasted here or i guess you could say stolen here from the customer but i'd like these people to come back again someday when they have other problems with other cars so i may get them this time around but once they find out if we were shady with them and lied to them they will never come back again unfortunately there's lots of dealerships and lots of shops across america and even around the world but especially in america right now that bank on i don't care if they come back we just need to get them for everything they got right now and get them out the door or another possibility is the techs don't have the training to properly diagnose it and they just go with the customer's hunch okay let's just throw a transmission in it and if we put a new transmission in this car right now it would have the same codes the same problems all over again let me show you guys what we found yeah laying down on the job there wizard i am laying down on the job because laying down on this job helped us discover what's wrong magic mike has all the center console and all kinds of things under the dash apart he was diving in and seeing if there's some wiring issues and there definitely is what's going on here guys is rodent damage mice got in it chewed up the wires some sort of road it's got in here these wires are damaged let me show you guys here we have one wire chewed clear in half here's another one here that's halfway chewed through and if i run my fingers back here i can feel rough spots of all kinds of wires and things that are chewed up and therein lies our problem there's communication wires that have been severed clear in half there's three dashes on the dash like magic mike uh told you guys and that usually means that that is the symbol of death or whatever they call it that the transmission is done but it's not giving those symbols because the transmission is done it's giving those symbols because it can't talk with the transmission just like in the codes we saw the problem is right there so that is a closed case magic mic is actually temporarily reconnected some of these wires just for testing and things started coming back alive and the code started slowly going away one by one so we have verified once we repair that bundle of wires that have been chewed up this car will be able to shift just fine drive just fine and do everything that it was supposed to do like it's supposed to very likely we can do all these repairs we do have a lot of investigative time involved diagnosis which adds up pretty fast and we'll have a little time fixing this wires but i'm thinking 500 or less they'll have their car back on the road not 5 000 or 8 000 or whatever it would cost for a new transmission so i really wanted to stress to you guys in this video how so easy in this situation it would be so easy for me to make a phone call yep you need a new transmission and i could clean these people out cars today especially on the transmissions have lots of solenoids

Excerpt¶

youtube.com/car_wizard/2011_smart_fortwo_is_seriously_not_shifting_right_what_the_car_wizard_finds_will · p. 4 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

wires sensors all kinds of things going on that when they fail or they're cut by mice it can give symptoms of a failed transmission but the transmission may not have failed well kind of like the malibu that's up there when its transmission started slipping or doing weird things it probably really is ruined because there wasn't any wiring involved so it can kind of trick you on these cars on these newer ones things can happen that feel like something's really majorly wrong even though it's not so again the purpose of the video is to help you guys understand when you go to a shop make sure you can trust the shop maybe even double check their diagnosis because it can be so easy to get taken to the cleaners on these jobs i can't wait to get this thing fixed and give it back to the customer and they don't have to drain their savings it's going to be so nice i actually enjoy doing that i would rather make them smile and have them come back again rather than to have them crying in the office because they're broke now so if you're curious what kind of tools magic might use to dig down and find out what's wrong with this car check my amazon affiliates link in the description below we get a small cut and i really appreciate it and make sure to hit the subscribe button because there's scenarios like this happening all the time and it means more videos for you guys thanks for watching [Music] you