Diagnostic Services
Diagnostic Services
M.V.R.S Mobile Vehicle Repair Services is your trusted partner for automotive diagnostics.
As pictured in small above, is your check engine light on? If it is you can give us a call and book us to come out to you and have it checked by one of our highly skilled technicians. We can plug our scanner in to your vehicles OBD port and read the code’s its displaying. Its always worthwhile to do so when you see the fault light as it may be a quick fix so to speak, or then again it may be something more involved. The OBD port is your cars way of allowing us to connect into it, and a way for it to be able to tell us of what issues its having. The check engine light may be on for a simple reason, or it might be on for a more serious one. Our technicians will identify your vehicles problem and deliver on site repair estimations, options, and support for it to be problem free again.
On-board diagnostics (OBD) is an automotive term referring to a vehicle’s self-diagnostic and reporting capability. OBD systems give the repair technician access to the status of the vehicles sub-systems. The amount of diagnostic information available via On Board Diagnostics or OBD has varied widely since it was introduction. For example in the early 1980s versions of on-board vehicle computers OBD would simply illuminate a malfunction indicator light or “idiot light” if a problem was detected but would not provide any information as to the nature of the problem. Modern OBD implementations use a standardized digital communications port called OBD port to provide real time data in addition to a standardized series of diagnostic trouble codes, or DTCs, which allow a person to rapidly identify and remedy malfunctions within the vehicle.
You may be wondering how a car even knows that it has any faults?
Well in layman’s terms here goes. This is a question which passes through the mind of a lot of people.
Whether a fault exists or not is calculated by the engine computer, or one or more of the other computers as any data is received from the plethora of sensors that cars have these days. The computers are constantly verifying the information coming in against look up tables which are stored within themselves and then they are cross referencing that data to see if it falls within an acceptable range. If the data falls out of this acceptable range the mil light or check engine light as its commonly called is turned on. Also stored is a code which relates to the fault. It never exactly pin points the fault one hundred percent though. Moreover it offers a direction to solving the problem and its the experience from the technician then which, and after analysing other data through something called live data showing other sensor readouts, makes his or her logical assessment as to what the exact fix may or may not be. Be aware there can be multiple varying symptoms to problems. To an untrained person they might think its one thing and then with research find out later its not that but something else instead causing the problem.
For example if you are looking at a scan tool and its reading a rich value coming from an O2 sensor in a car which is heavily misfiring. The engine is running really bad at tick over too. This can be caused by multiple different things going wrong though. The fault code might be saying O2 sensor rich but it may not be the O2 sensor itself at all. It could actually be a faulty ignition system instead. The fuel in the engine is not exploding because there is no spark from the faulty ignition, so in this case neat fuel is simply being pushed down the exhaust pipe and this is being read by the O2 sensor.
Experience prevails. You must have a lot of experience with internal combustion engines to be able to accurately diagnose faults fast, and in doing so it pays to have an open mind when presented with problems too.
