Mark: Hi, it's Mark Bossert. I'm here with Bernie Pawlik, Pawlik Automotive in Vancouver. Vancouver's best auto service experience 25 times, voted best in Vancouver by their customers. We're talking cars. How you doing Bernie?
Bernie: Doing very well.
Mark: So today's guest is a 2017 Hyundai Tucson, was in for a service. How does your service program actually work?
Bernie: So generally for maintenance services, we have two. There's an A service and a B service. And on this Hyundai, we did a B service. The a service is basically an oil and filter change along with a more basic inspection. We look at fluids, lights, under hood, basic under car. But the B service, which you should probably do every year to two, depending on the age of the car is where we do a very thorough, comprehensive inspection on the vehicle.
We pull the wheels off, look at the brakes, measure the brakes, inspect the steering suspension thoroughly, test the battery and charging system. Yeah, it's a very thorough inspection, so we can go over that today.
Mark: All right, let's move to what does it actually look like?
Bernie: Yeah, so this, as a customer is what you will see when we do the inspection. There's basically three categories. There are red items, orange items, and green items, like traffic lights, for example. Red are important things to do right now. Orange are things to watch and need to be done, but not urgent. And then green, of course, are things that we inspected and looked fine.
So this vehicle, there's no red items. I mean, you see a picture of the car's in good shape, 144,000 kilometres. It's got some usage for sure, and it's I guess about eight years old at this point. Eight, nine years old. So there are a few items recommended. So if we just go down the list on the right hand side. On the road test noted a slight shutter when you accelerate from a stop, really minor, which we made the note on. So just keep it under observation.
Transmission fluid due by mileage to be replaced. Engine coolant level was low. And some of these things, you see beside the coolant there, there's a little paperclip, has some notes. So we break the inspection down. We take pictures of things. So there's a coolant leak that we noticed. Very minor seat from a hose connection. Yeah, and you can see that there, there's a little red arrow in the picture that points to it. And also underneath the vehicle we found the right outer CV boot was leaking grease. So that boot and or axle needs to be replaced.
Coolant level low. You can see this is the coolant overflow bottle, which is really easy to see under the hood of this vehicle. You can see the max level, the min level, and the coolant was below that. So investigated a little further as we did the inspection, found some coolant leaking, looks like the engine oil cooler assembly was leaking coolant. So again, not a huge amount of leakage, but enough you can see the green stain on the oil filter and coolant coming from up above. So that will need to be replaced at some point in the near future. Noted that the tire pressures were too low, we adjusted them. Then we get into the good stuff, the green things.
Big list of items. These are all things that we inspected that are all good. And, and notes there on the battery condition. The brakes. We measure the brake pads. There's a photo of the good brake pads. The rotors measurements for pads, rotors, if you just sort of take a brief look as you, if you're looking over this podcast and, and the, and the notes, you can see all the items we inspect. Tires as well. There's a picture of the tires. Sometimes we only take pictures of things that are bad, but sometimes it's good to take pictures of good things and you know what they look like. And that's pretty much it. So, a few items needed, but not a lot and nothing urgent. You know, nothing needed necessarily at the moment.
Mark: So if memory serves, this was a generation of Hyundai that had some major engine problems. Was that the case with this vehicle?
Bernie: Yeah, the owner of this car had been a client for a long time. He purchased this vehicle used and it had had the engine replaced before he bought it. So this is yeah, 144K is the engine had gone bad on this one, which they tend to for most Hyundai and Hyundai of this variety.
Mark: So then at that point when you show the owner, here's what our report has shown. They get to choose which one of these things they're gonna deal with now, which ones they can put into the future. But do you give them a timeframe when it should be done?
Bernie: Oh yeah, definitely. You know, and in terms of priorities on this thing, certainly the coolant leak would be the highest priority item. Second, I would say would be the CV boot or axle replacement. And then the fluids would be the next thing to do. They're recommended based on time and mileage, so nothing critically wrong with them, but it's good to change the fluids, over time.
Mark: If you want this engine to last, you change the fluids.
Bernie: Yeah, well, exactly. I mean the key thing is changing the engine oil. The problem with the engines on these things is, as I understand, it's basically like a manufacturing defect and I believe there's like metal material left inside the engine or something to that nature and eventually the engine bearings just fry out, so that's the critical thing. But they also have engine fires on these as well, which can happen after the engines have been replaced. And what I understand about that is sometimes, it's a high pressure fuel system, can leak and of course it's high pressure, sprays out, very hot engine compartment and poof, they catch on fire.
Yeah. It's interesting when I think about older cars, you know, old V8 engines with carburetors where sometimes the carburetors would just seep fuel on top of the engine and they would never catch fire. And in modern cars if you get like a minor leak, sometimes you go boom, it just goes because the heat is so much more intense.
Mark: Well, I'm sure it's probably vaporized. The gas is vapoured more and vapour's much more explosive than liquid.
Bernie: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, like liquid gasoline actually does not burn. It's the vapour. If you can keep the gas cool enough, you know and it's all liquid, you can throw a match into it and basically it'd light, but it won't go kaboom. Whereas vapour does.
Mark: Yeah. So there you go. If you're looking for service for your Hyundai in Vancouver, the guys to see are Pawlik Automotive. You can reach them online at pawlikautomotive.com. Or you can call them at (604) 327-7112 to book your appointment. You have to book ahead. They're always busy. Pawlik Automotive in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Thanks so much for watching and listening. Thanks Bernie.
Bernie: Thank you, Mark, and thanks for watching.
