Automotive Electrical Repair and Information

As an owner and mechanic, I have been involved in automotive electrical repairs in Huntington Beach for the past 28 years. In the past, auto electrical repairs revolved around basic lighting, starting/charging systems and blowers or fans. Everything was nice and simple. Not much wiring or electrical parts to diagnose. What evolved was due to demand for creature comfort and convenience.

Probably the first items to go electric were the power windows and door locks, generally beginning in the mid 1960’s. Although having a lot of wiring and crude motors by today’s standards, these systems were still fairly basic having switches, motors and wiring to connect them together. Easy to diagnose. On a late model car today, electric windows have electronic modules to control operation of the motors and direction of them; auto up, auto down, partial down for those cars having windows that must be down to open the doors and a variety of switches. The window modules and wired to the body control module for control and diagnostics. This type of system today requires digital meters, labscopes and up to date repair information.

For the engine, manufactures have had to go to individual fuel injectors and ignition coils to each cylinder. A Ford V10 obviously will have 10 coils and 10 injectors along with the necessary wiring. Emission control is the bottom line reason for individual injectors and coils. There are also a multitude of electrical sensors and actuators for engine management. As an example, more and more vehicles do not use a throttle cable any more. Commonly known as drive by wire, the throttle pedal sensor sends signals to the engine computer and the engine computer evaluates the signal along with other engine signals and talks to the brake system and other systems the engineers have wired in and finally sends the go ahead for the throttle actuator to open the throttle plate for acceleration. Again for emission control and stability control.

Your vehicle may have full adjustable heated and cooled power seats, wipers for the headlights, security systems, navigation, automatic climate control and on and on. All the computers for these systems talk to each other for everything to work properly as designed. I do not know if the engineers created the demand by building these systems or the demand truly came from consumers. One thing is for sure - when everything is working normally all is great.

All this boils down to a serious need and understanding of electricity and electrical circuits. Without this knowledge and experience someone doing an electrical repair can get lost quickly and easily. Times have changed as electrical systems have become more complex, hopefully so has your mechanic and auto repair shop.