youtube.com/car_wizard/smart_car_with_three_stupid_problems_that_other_shops_refused_to_fix¶
4 excerpts.
Excerpt¶
youtube.com/car_wizard/smart_car_with_three_stupid_problems_that_other_shops_refused_to_fix · p. 1 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike
why is this smart car here all the way from Nebraska let's find out this is 2013 Smart Car pure is the the model it is smart for two you know two people fit in here it's pretty much all it is this thing scares a lot of mechanics I mean it scares the living hell out of them I mean it's like you're asking them to do open heart surgery or something this person's all the way from Nebraska because they keep getting told nope nope nope won't touch it won't touch it and they're so easy to work on I've actually experienced this from other customers who say I soon as I mention the word smart car I instantly got the word no shouted very loudly no we will not work on those it's just a mercedesbenz I'll show you some parts on here today see if we can find something with the Mercedes logo on it but they're so easy to work on it's like working on your kid's go-kart it's so simple why is everyone so afraid of a smart car because there's engine in the back and things are all not what they're used to and it's not like working on Grandpa's Ford Crown Victoria from 1959 so no I don't want to touch it anyways why is it here it's here because the blower motor when you you turn it on it literally shakes the whole dash we're going to take a look at that and find out why it's doing that number two the AC is not blowing very cold we're going to get to the bottom of that show a little bit of diagnostic work also we're going to check the codes actually connect the scan tool and see why the check engine light is on and how it has nothing to do with the engine so without further Ado let's take a look around this thing okay everybody don't blink I think this is going to be a quick review yeah it's not a very big car there's the front of the smart car looks like any other Smart Car really and there is some little bumps and bruises on this thing it's not a showroom car they use it to drive around in as you can see right here on the fender looks like a little bit of scrape or something a small dent going on there but look at those lug nuts guys three it's a triangle of lug nuts isn't that weird only needs three but basically most of the car is taken up by the door to the front of the door or the rear there's really not much maybe a foot foot and a half Mrs wizard it's not very much it's a very large door so it is definitely a a tiny little car and it's a smart car as you can see from Nebraska and you might ask why are there holes in the bumper that's because the engine's in the back we'll show you here in a little bit it's for flow through ventilation to let some air flow through basically all that does and here we are just a few steps Mrs Wizard and we're to the other side not a very big car let's go ahead and hop into to the interior there we are ladies gents 12,957 Mi and this is going to look pretty nice here it's a little Dusty which I would definitely anticipate because it's been warm here in Kansas and Nebraska so I imagine they had to drive it down here with the windows down so it's got a little bit of dust on it but other than dust that's easy to wipe off very simple very plain interior there's not a lot of interior to the car cuz there's just not a lot of space here but we do have one little hidey hole which is the perfect size right napkins love it nice and stays closed as we move down you'll see we've got I guess interesting coin holders right there I'm guessing you put some four quarters or so in there I guess I'm not sure but gear selector very easy to use not a lot of options cuz it is an automatic car got big cup holder down below interesting thing here is that this is where the ignition is so you push your key here to get that car started so that's kind of interesting do have our e bra in the center and they have a little bit of documentation and ice scraper as we look at our seats they are cloth and they actually go very high up they almost to the ceiling so very impressive gives you lots of you know I guess Comfort no bolster on the side cuz it's a smart car you're not going drifting around corners that'd be silly as so look at our floor they do have nice weather tech mats and oh my there's a mouse trap um wizard said that um luckily um he didn't get in on that side earlier because he said that was actually ready to you know snap so maybe that's their way to deter my from nibbling on their Electronics or at least the wiring yikes door card is in great condition got a little dust got a little bit of wear but for the age and for the number of miles on here this is presenting very well as we look at the back shelf I guess there's a little bit of space back there you could actually put maybe four five six bags of groceries back here you know could make it a little bit of a grocery hauler but nothing crazy but it looks very easy to open very easy to you know slide things in and out even though you cannot put people back there with no pretend back
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youtube.com/car_wizard/smart_car_with_three_stupid_problems_that_other_shops_refused_to_fix · p. 2 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike
seat back there so here we are ladies and back at our steering wheel with our lovely smart logo on it and I haven't seen anything screaming I'm Mercedes in here so far but we still have other time to look for that when we get the engine bay open but I want to hear what's going on with this blower motor let's turn that key [Music] on not sure if you can feel that l gents but it's got definitely got a rhythm to it let's turn that off so you heard in the dash it's literally shaking the dash and we need to pull the blow motor out to see what's going on so I'm going to get under there and actually pull it out it's very simple it's in the driver's floorboard area it just twist out and comes out we're going to take a look at it and see why is it shaking so bad and making that horrible buzzing noise that's one of the complaints a customer has is it sounds like my blue motor is about to blow apart so let me go ahead and get that out for you [Applause] guys so is it it appears that they have used the technology used in most vacuum cleaners yeah that was actually very quick it's not hard to take out it has little I guess you call them tangs or slots that just twists and pulls straight out it's very simple to take out but let's find out what's making it shake so bad I have a hunch that for some reason the actual blower wheel is out of balance and making it shake horrible let's take a look together I'm going spin slowly and see if we see any debris or broken blades or anything uhoh there we go take one blade out and the whole thing is out of kilter and out of balance so the weight distribution on this and the centrifugal force is causing this thing to shake violently and it probably will only get worse if you don't do anything about it on speed one or two you may not feel feel it too good on a hot day when you want full blast you want the air to blow nice and strong is literally shaking the dash and I've seen some of these where the dash is literally shaking even worse where two or three blades are missing so all this needs is a new blower motor now a person could say just replace the blower wheel but as you can see it's just pressed on from the factory and I think if you take that off it's probably you're not going to get the next one to press on very easily and with 120,000 Mi why do we want to keep using the old motor just put a whole new assembly and don't have to think about it again for a long time cuz you know as soon as we just put only the wheel on in 2 months the motor will go out because it's been running so long out of balance like this that the bushings and things could be shot and say I thought we had this solved when you replace the wheel they're getting a whole new motor luckily you can pick these up for like 100 bucks or something 100 I don't know I'll have to look for sure but I I think they're around 100 150 depending on if you get name brand you could probably get a cheap one from China for really cheap but I'm not going to put that in here and have it go out in 3 months so we'll put a OEM beay brand back in that will solve this issue the labor on it it took more time to figure out what's wrong than to even replace it so it's probably not going to be very high at all so the next issue we have is a check engine light so let's look into that so I've got my auto max assist ms906 out go ahead and turn on the key power and we'll go to diagnosis control unit we're going to go to the engine control unit cuz we have a check engine light not a check ABS light or something else trouble codes the outside temperature sensor has a short circuit to battery p73 so you see a check engine light on you think oh my engine's going to blow up or something's wrong with the engine but the truth is there can be issues to trigger that light actually have nothing to do with the engine that's the second complaint we're going to take a look at that when we get the little hood or whatever you want to call it off the front the third complaint is the AC is not blowing very cold we can take care of those two items or at least diagnose them under the front hood so let's get that thing off a long time ago probably 3 or 4 years ago I went to a local shop I'm kind of friends with and borrowed a tool that I did have in their shop they had a smart car being worked on they attempted to take take it on and they were looking for the engine and I saw their mechanic while I was talking with my buddy he just grabbed this and started pulling and broke the tabs and broke all kind of things and then he got it off and he's like where's the engine I talked to my buddy I said he probably shouldn't be working on that car and he goes I know it I should have never took this thing on I don't know it's not that hard let me show you how you take this off that's two little Clips that's it right here so
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youtube.com/car_wizard/smart_car_with_three_stupid_problems_that_other_shops_refused_to_fix · p. 3 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike
you see this little cut out right here there's actually a little little uh release Here you pull it out like that let's go to the other side just like that that releases the two latches that are at the bottom of this panel so you there's two other Clips up here that you don't want to break so we lift up that's it you don't manhandle it like a gorilla and rip it off there's two little latches right here look it spins do you remember the Power Rangers Mrs wizard uh I did but I really wasn't watching them much kind of what it looks like here anyways I'll put this aside one thing that this customer did that they mentioned on the paperwork I'm going to honk the horn and I want to see if it matches the car let me know what you guys think let me go honk it real quick holy crap C wizard what the hell was that that was not a smart car horn no actually the customer mentioned they put General Motors 4 Note horn just like we heard in the' 7s Cadillacs the big long Lan Yachts this has a ser set of horns so I'm thinking what happened there's an outside temperature sensor that's supposed to be right in a location of where the horns were let's take a look and see what's been done off camera I took these screws off so we can take a peek behind this panel not having to take the whole thing off but it's just enough that we can see kind of what's going on let's take a look we can see four big horns and some wiring that they ran but the outside temperature sensor is nowhere to be found it should be in this this area maybe it didn't look important or they thought they would relocate it and accidentally ran a screw through the wiring I don't know I'm going to have to get in the air maybe pull the bumper off and do some serious digging but now that I've seen some modification happening right in the area where the sensor should be and it's saying that it's short to battery short voltage that tells me something has happened I kind of have an idea now what's going on I bet it's just a wire pinched or cut or something like that and I'll have to get in there and just repair it probably nothing serious so problem number two is going to be a little bit more digging but I have an idea what happened with that number three the AC is not blowing very cold on these cars in order to even hook an AC machine up you first have to take this panel off the Power Ranger shield I'll show you where the ports are so here's our HVAC box it's actually a little round shaped box there but underneath it you can see there's one port and below it there's that the low side port it's kind of hard to see but that's where the ports are this is our handy dandy cool charge Tri R air conditioning machine we actually got it from bpack or Ranger products it has been very good so much better than the Matco one we had it is so much of an improvement but I've connected the machine I don't want to bore you guys with the 30 minute process of drawing all the refrigerant out and weighing it and all that but I've actually already done it it's a little low on refrigerant but not enough to make it just stop cooling all together now now I'm actually seeing that problem number two has something to do with problem number three the air conditioning system uses the outside temperature sensor which we just showed you is missing I don't even know where it's at I'll have to pull the bumper off that's short circuited there's a check engine light on for that which means it's not getting a signal to the air conditioning system and it's a little low on refrigerant so that's where two problems actually combined to become one big problem so we have two problems on this car not three a blower motor and the sensor is who knows what's wrong with it and a little refrigerant and it'll be back in business again so we figured out kind of what's going on here I want to show you guys the engine so many people see these cars on the road and they hear this about it or hear that about it as far as where the engine is let's actually let you guys take a look at one so these open kind of like a double hatch like this you go to open the lower part but it doesn't open the lower part it only opens the glass then inside there another little switch that lets the tailgate down right here kind of a weird little setup but underneath this back carpet is where the engine actually resides let me go get a tool to get that Torx screw out of the way so now we'll pull this little string
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youtube.com/car_wizard/smart_car_with_three_stupid_problems_that_other_shops_refused_to_fix · p. 4 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike
here that they provided for us and pull the carpet out of the way then we have a little turn like that and there's our little three cylinder engine 1 2 3 three coils it's a one L 3 cylinder engine tiny tiny tiny little guy other than being dirty and a little Dusty nothing screaming Mercedes except for this one label diimler AG which is mercedesbenz so they're the parent company they're actually the company that manufactures these this is basically underneath all the skin is a mercedesbenz now the transmission can be a little bit complicated on these you know on some of the uh Lamborghinis we have e-gear and also oner where we have the F1 transmission it's very similar situation on this there's no clutch that you actually push you just start giving it some gas and it automatically does the clutch for you it's kind of a automated manual if you want to call it they do give some trouble here or there but they're not that big of a deal so now you guys have seen that actually the engine sits behind you underneath the floor carpet here kind of a weird little car so now you guys have been introduced to the Smart car we love them here at Omega we have no trouble at all working on them we enjoy working on them yes please call us if you have a smart car that's broken we would love to work on it we will not be afraid of it secondly I've got a lot of people say are these good cars are they reliable or blah blah blah I get emails about them yes they're Fairly reliable they're they're good little cars really they're designed for big cities like Tokyo Los Angeles uh London places like that where there's packed in tight you can really Zoom around town in one of these cars and it gets really good gas mileage I would love to have one of these in one of those really packed tight large cities but out in the open Plains in the middle of Nebraska or Kansas I don't know that there's any benefit to them they don't get any better gas mileage than a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla and they're way way smaller I have seen videos on YouTube which you guys are watching YouTube Imagine That these get hit by a semi TR it's not so much about the impact I mean they actually are very safe as far as crunching or crushing but what scares me about these is that if they're hit by a very large vehicle like a semi it's like kicking a soccer ball they literally fly off into the median or into the ditch or something that's what scares me about them on the open Highway at 80 mph speeds it's going it's like a soccer ball basically so keep that in mind they really are good in town in a large city they can zoom around into places your big SUV can't get to they can parallel park into small little places very very useful for that so now I've shown you kind of a diagnostic process we we have more digging to do I need to pull the whole front bumper off and find out what happened to that outside temperature sensor when they put in these horns what happened there so I need to find that out maybe I'll let you guys know on a social media post hey look I found it but I now know the AC and the check engine light are tied in kind of right here in this area the issues we'll get a new blower motor ordered she'll be back in business if you're curious what kind of tools we use to work on this smart car or any other car in the shop check our Amazon offi it's Link in the description below if you purchase anything we get a small cut and really appreciate it and make sure to click the Subscribe button here because there's so many more cool videos for you guys very informative videos thanks for watching oh [Music]