> I got 3 completely unrelated recommendations, including one that I knew was invalid! I felt worse off than when I started!
I almost had a very similar experience with my beater Lexus. It took 2 independent shops and 3 dealers to finally figure out what was causing the ABS to go off randomly at low speeds. Turns out there's some obscure Toyota-specific tool from the late '90s that picked up a proprietary diagnostic code, and the third dealer was the only one that still had that particular piece of equipment.
...and of course, the thing that's broken has been out of production for 20 years and remanufactured ones cost more than the car is worth. I ended up just unplugging the ABS control module.
Point being: once I knew what was wrong, all the seemingly contradictory information from the other 4 shops suddenly fit together. It's just such a weird thing to go wrong that no reasonable tech would ever have considered it.
I almost had a very similar experience with my beater Lexus. It took 2 independent shops and 3 dealers to finally figure out what was causing the ABS to go off randomly at low speeds. Turns out there's some obscure Toyota-specific tool from the late '90s that picked up a proprietary diagnostic code, and the third dealer was the only one that still had that particular piece of equipment.
...and of course, the thing that's broken has been out of production for 20 years and remanufactured ones cost more than the car is worth. I ended up just unplugging the ABS control module.
Point being: once I knew what was wrong, all the seemingly contradictory information from the other 4 shops suddenly fit together. It's just such a weird thing to go wrong that no reasonable tech would ever have considered it.