My blood boiled over years ago. Now I'm just a hard boiled egg head gone rotten.....ooops mean cynical.
Frying pan to fire and back again.
Back to the original point! It seems clear to me that modern automotive technology has far outstripped the ability of dealers and technicians to keep pace in many cases. Indeed they often rely or computer diagnostics readouts etc. as being gospel truth and have no fundamental understanding of the technology and the often subtile "cause and effects".
I've probably mentioned this before but many moons ago our old Tempra 1.8ie used to pink/tinkle at high rpm loads. It went back several times under warranty, was tested with the then diagnostic kit and idle timing, rpm and vacuum advance were found to be OK. Not satisied I eventual set to the problem myself. A simple "back to basics" static timing test, followed by a simple dynamic strobe test shown that the TDC sensor was set 5 degrees too far advanced. So when the technician plug his diagnostic kit in the kit/computer took the TDC signal as a reference point and measured everything from there. Computer said X degrees when infact it was 5+X degrees.
That was back in 1993! God knows how many other similar errors could be occuring due to lack of basic engineering / automotive engineering knowledge these days.
