On the surface, all may seem well with your car: you have been driving it constantly for these couple of years and you rarely visit a garage if ever. Basically, there seems to be nothing wrong with the vehicle itself, and you could possibly think that the vehicle can keep going on and on for a few decades without the need for a major repair.
Then, all of a sudden, you face hell: your vehicle leaves you stranded on the road, it eats up the engine along with the transmission, wears through its brake pads and tires like a truck and starts burning oil, while the electronics also call it a day. In truth, horror stories like these are becoming more and more common among vehicle owners due to certain reasons. One of them is the fact that they just don’t care about vehicles that much, while the other one has to do with the fact that modern cars are unlike what we have been driving on the road for the past few decades.
Let’s take some time to discuss the above-mentioned fact: older vehicles tended to rely mostly on mechanical systems, which means that almost anybody out there with some knowledge on how a car works could repair it given that he or she had the right tools for the job. Choosing a good mechanic was no harder than selecting which one was your favourite grocery store. Furthermore, all vehicles were pretty similar, and parts replacement was quite effortless.With the improvements in computer technology, it was only a matter of time before car manufacturers started implementing various complicated electrical and even electronic systems into their new vehicles.
In truth, this was done because they provided several advantages over pure mechanical systems, which lead to a decrease in emissions and an overall increase in engine power outputs, not to mention the ability to develop passive safety systems and other amenities like automatic climate control. On the whole, the introduction of computers into vehicles provided more benefits than initially thought, but they made vehicles way more complex.
Vehicles sold nowadays tend to rely a lot on their onboard computers: some models, especially high-end sedans, sports cars and SUVs, have all of their systems integrated with each other: this means that every new component installation must be done by notifying the car computer about the changes, or else it will simply fail to initialize. This can lead to confusion if the person doing the car repairs Wagga doesn’t have enough knowledge about how such systems work. This is when advanced diagnostics can come in handy.
Modern vehicles are actually supposed to undergo advanced diagnostic tests in order to identify issues. Their computers are built in such a way that they give codes as output in response to what may be at fault in their systems, thus making it possible to repair the vehicle in a much shorter time period. Due to this, it is advised that you take brand new cars only to centres who have these specialized diagnostic tools to do this kind of tests.