Mark: Hi, it's Mark Bossert. I'm here with Bernie Pawlik, Pawlik Automotive in Vancouver, Vancouver's best auto service experience, and we're talking cars. How you doing Bernie?
Bernie: Doing very well.
Mark: Today's guest is a 2017 Dodge EcoDiesel. It always makes me laugh, EcoDiesel. So what was going on with this vehicle?
Bernie: So the owner had experienced the vehicle was starting to crank over for an extended period of time. You know, normally it would start quite quickly, but now it was like cranking for a long period of time. He was concerned about it, brought it in. Did some diagnosis. Scanned the vehicle and looked for trouble codes. Found a crankshaft sensor performance code, which is a very likely code for an engine that's having some crank over issues. Did some research and based on some experience of our own, assume there's something wrong with the crankshaft position sensor or the tone ring, which the crankshafts position sensor gets its information from. Which basically triggers the crank staff sensor. These two parts fail. And cause it to crank over
Mark: So, a toned ring. What does that mean? It's an extra ring that's behind or somewhere around the crankshaft that is positioning indicated?
Bernie: Yeah. This ring sits on the back of the flange of the crankshaft where the flywheel bolts up, it just slips over and often it can be like a magnetic material or a material with little slots in it. You can't actually see them but for the electronic sensor, it picks them up. So there's like little micro slots cut into it. And as a sensor spins, it can get an idea how fast it's turning. Sometimes what position it's in, depending on how the slots are made. So, fortunately, and I say fortunately, on this truck, it's actually got a little piece of fits over.
My service advisor tells me he's calling the Dodge dealer, and some of them, it's actually built onto the crankshaft. And if it has that particular design, you actually have to replace the whole crankshaft, which is just an insane amount of work.
Mark: Well, isn't it almost better to change the engine at that point?
Bernie: Well, almost, yeah. You can take the crank shaft apart on most engines without taking the whole engine apart, but you have to take it out.
Mark: It's a big job.
Bernie: It's like lung surgery on a human or something. It's not easy.
Mark: It's a lung transplant basically. Alright, let's see our vehicle. Our guest today. So here's our 2017 Dodge Ram, and let's have a look at what's actually happening here.
So what's this part?
Bernie: This is a crank shop position sensor. So this bolts up behind the flywheel, behind the ring gear flywheel.
This is the tone, I'll call it a tone wheel. I don't know if that's exactly the correct term, but this is the sensor ring that goes in the back of the crank shift. I only took one picture on this angle, but that chunk of silver there should not be there. And if you look at just above it, you can see the plastic has cracked. That's basically chunks of it have come apart, which has caused our issue.
Now that ring sits behind, you can see five bolts there and there's eight bolt holes and five bolts. That ring sits in behind this plate.
Mark: In behind this viewport here, or whatever this is, underneath that.
Bernie: Yeah. So to do this job, involves a transmission to be removed. Transmission comes out, and then we can take the ring gear off and all the parts are there. You can see that you've, I think you got your most pointer. The little crosshatch piece, the sensor gear. That's the sensor right there. That bolts up to a little plate at the bottom. That's where it gets all its signals from. I mean, it could have put out the front of the engine or many different other, easier to access spots, but for some reason they chose to make it difficult and expensive to fix.
Mark: This is a pretty big job, honestly, to take the transmission out and I mean, it's better on a truck probably than a transverse mounted vehicle, but it's a lot of work.
Bernie: Yeah, it's a lot of work. It's a four wheel drive truck. So there's, you know, two drive shafts, transfer case, and big transmission. Yeah, it's a lot of work.
Mark: So I'm assuming that you're not shipping it back to the customer with some bolts missing. What happened here?
Bernie: No. So interestingly enough, you can only get these bolts from a Chrysler dealer. So we called our local dealership and said, Hey, we need eight of these bolts. Five of 'em arrive and we're going, where's the other three? It's like, oh, we can only sell you five at a time. They come in packs of five. There's some kind of issue with supply or something, and we're only permitted to sell five of these bolts every two days or every week or something like that. Something crazy like that.
So we're going, we got this thing apart, we gotta deliver it to the customer. So there's another Chrysler dealer nearby, and they were able to oblige us with five more bolts. So you know, I go, why sell in packs of five when you need eight?
Mark: And it's a common failure item?
Bernie: Yeah. This is a common failure item. I don't quite understand. It's like that, you know, you get 12 hot dogs in a pack and eight buns or something. You know, that kind of scenario. Why isn't it standardized? I gotta laugh because it's like, I don't know, otherwise it would just drive us crazy in this business.
Mark: So once you change that tone ring and the sensor, I suppose. Just because the sensor might have been okay, but change it while you're in there because it could fail later.
Bernie: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, those sensors do fail too. I mean, crank sensor failure on a Mercedes for not starting is a hugely common issue. This isn't a Mercedes, but you know, certain vehicles, there's just common issues. This one happens to be the wheel's bad, but you know, you change both at the same time. You wouldn't wanna go back in there or have the customer come back in six months or a year going, oh, it doesn't quite start again. It's like, oh yeah, we didn't change the sensor. We tried to save you some money.
Mark: And here you are back for another $5,000 bill.
Bernie: Yeah. It wasn't that bad of a job, but, you know, it's a few thousand bucks, so.
Mark: And how'd the vehicle run after everything was changed over?
Bernie: Yeah. Perfect. Fired up right away and crank started immediately. No more codes. As expected.
Mark: Good for another 10 years.
Bernie: Yeah, exactly. It's a shame that only lasts for that long. You think it would be a lot more durable than that.
Mark: Well, you have mentioned that the EcoDiesel, how are they for reliability?
Bernie: There's a lot of issues. I would be reluctant to buy one myself, I'll put it that way. I mean, they run great, good fuel economy, good power, good specs, maybe you wanna tow a boat, you know, it's better than the gasoline engine. So there's a lot of attractive features. But we do a lot of repairs on them, a lot of things go wrong. So I'd say they're not the best, they're not the most robust engine out there.
Mark: If you're having issues with your EcoDiesel in Vancouver, the people to see are Pawlik Automotive. They're experts. You can reach them online to book your appointment 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: And thank you, Mark. And thank you for watching.
