2008 Saturn Vue troubles


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Old 03-10-10, 06:19 PM
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2008 Saturn Vue troubles

I have a 08 Saturn am having a no start condition. The dealer has had it more than me lately, going on 4 weeks now. This problem has happened 4 times and returned to the dealer. They still can't figure out what is blowing this fuse.
What kind of lemon laws do i have available to me. I had it over 2 years now. Its paid off. Gm has taken over Saturn repairs at the Chevy dealer.
 
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Old 03-10-10, 07:03 PM
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That still should be under some kind of warrenty,what fuse is blowing? Unless you have a commercial sale on that one Gm still/should have it covered.does it crank and no start or no crank with a blown fuse? Sorry need more input to give you a plausable answer.
 
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Old 03-11-10, 07:07 AM
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What have the mechanics tested? Did they take out the solenoid/starter and have it bench tested to see if it is drawing too many amps? Did they look at the wiring schematic to make sure nothing else on that circuit?
 
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Old 03-11-10, 10:44 AM
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08 Saturn Vue

Its a no start, crank, or even a click. Dash lights all go on but thats all. I'm not sure what fuse it is but they replaced the whole fuse block then the control module. Tested the ign switch. but they have the top engineer in mi. coming in today.
It is covered under the warrinty but do I have any lemmon laws that will get me another car. My wife just don't trust this thing any more. There is no worning whatsoever. They even said it blows the fuse just sitting there without doing anything at all.
 
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Old 03-11-10, 11:17 AM
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Mechanics are "new" to this electronics thing. And as a rule are not real experienced in that area.

In the rest of the electronics world (and what the auto industry will eventually learn), is that when you have a problem which has not been resolved with a couple of repair visits, it needs to be escalated to a more knowledgeable repair technician.

And if that person can't fix it, then send someone from the factory to fix it.

And as you get more highly skilled persons working on the problem, along with that would come more advanced testing equipment and "free reign" for the technician to work on the problem as long as is necessary to get it fixed.

As it is now, they get paid so much time for a specific problem and that is it. It is to the advantage of the mechanic to do something quick, then get it out the door. Otherwise the mechanic is losing money.

I've worked on electronics in areas other than automotive and we might have a customer who had 6 technicians go out to fix a problem and could not find anything wrong. The customer would be ticked! So my boss would tell me to go out and "fix it"!

He would say; "I don't care what it costs, spend as much time as you need. And don't charge the customer anything. I don't care if you have to replace the entire system!"

Then I might spend 2 days working on that problem, and then get it fixed. The customer was happy and understood it was a difficult problem to find.

With electronic testing, you can monitor the amperage. And go BEYOND that. You can "record" the amperage being used with advanced test equipment which records the amperage being used as the vehicle is driven.

Then look at the electrical diagrams and see what all is on that circuit. Move the amperage monitoring equipment further down the line and monitor specific things. Specific wires on that circuit. Find where the problem is coming from.

But this takes time! Lots of time. No one is going to do all this if they don't know how, don't have this advanced test equipment, and will not be paid for the time they spend working on the problem.

Ask if they have someone from the factory who has a recording amp meter and who can record the amperage used by each device connected to that circuit. (Each fuse can go to several different gizmos.)

BTW - Your "typical" mechanic should not know how to do all this. Learning this can take years of school in just the electrical area and years of experience. They should have people available in different areas of the country who specialize in these hard to find problems and could fix them.

(Sort of like your regular doctor would send you to a specialist for something he is not real familiar with.)

Edit: I was posting this while you posted the above, so see they are escalating! (Good!)
 
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Old 03-11-10, 05:04 PM
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Originally Posted by Woodwright
They even said it blows the fuse just sitting there without doing anything at all.
It is kind of nice for everyone to know such facts in the beginning.

If it does it just sitting there, then why is the problem ascribed to the starting system? Have you asked such a question of them?

What happens for example if when the car is 'just sitting there', that you say go and turn the lights, radio, wiper, and blower/ac on all at once? Then again......if it does it just sitting there..........(pause for thought).
 
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Old 03-12-10, 12:50 AM
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Lemon Laws vary from state to state you may have to look on your states web sight for that answer.With what you say has been replaced it almost sounds like they are working along the lines of the security system is having issues.GM has been having troubles with these for a while starting in 07.A programming issue is my personal opinion but you'll never hear about it.Been through a number of steps to try and correct a problem and it seems like the second or third BCM always fixes it.A pain for both me and my customer and no explanation from GM as to why it took so many times to get one that worked and would accept calibration and stay.
Sorry couldn't be more help
 
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Old 03-12-10, 09:20 AM
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Well that is another thing!

A "BCM" is a computer module. And as a rule, the vehicle manufacturers keep the internals and operation of these a secret.

But if you are expecting someone to repair these and repair things connected to these, it is helpful and sometimes necessary to understand a bit on how they operate. What they do under different situations.

And sometimes (many times) electronic boards will have revisions and updates as problems are found. There might be a "Rev 1.0 board, Rev 1.1 board, a Rev 2.0 board, etc.

If the technician understands that there are newer boards and has access to the technical information as to why they were revised and what the revision fixes, then maybe the solution to the problem the technician is encountering can be fixed by getting the latest revision circuit board (part).

I once worked for a computer company and the computers were sometimes printing fractions on the printers and sometimes would not print fractions. Same exact printers! (Or so everyone thought!) As it turned out (with a little poking around and question asking), there were different revisions of "character chips" in the printers in the field. The newer revisions included fraction characters as printable characters. Older did not.

And the software engineering folks were tearing their hair out about this fraction sometimes not printing "bug" in the software.... As it turned out, this was not a bug, but a problem with the revision level of the printers!

And this technical information was not provided to other parts of the company. (Because they did not need to know this - so management thought....)

Anyway when fixing things, the more information you can get about how something works, the better.
 
 

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