TOYOTA GRANVIA. AT THE MERCY OF THE COMPUTER.

Ever had car troubles that just keep coming back and no matter how many times you took it back to the mechanic, they just cannot find the culprit but you ended up paying for it with no results? I’m certain every car owner has his/her share of bad luck when Murphy’s Law takes over and leave you stranded!

Ever since I left sold my personally cared-for 1998 Subaru Impreza WRX and rolled up my motorsports interests, my ride has been the Japanese domestic spec’d Toyota Granvia and is 10 years old this year! For almost a year now, my car suffered a problem that left me manually shifting a full automatic transmission vehicle from L to 2 to D before it would go.

 

In the beginning it would only happen intermittently (the worse kind of trouble) and if you can relate to this problem, the transmission would not kick down to L when it should so the car pretty much stayed in D and vehicle would be too heavy to leave the line at a junction or traffic light—this isn’t only extremely annoying but potentially dangerous. Imagine having to put up with this for nearly a year since it started occuring and you can imagine my reluctance to commute long journeys and you can probably relate now why I dread my work commutes–this problem just compounds it!

So, after many months of failed attempts to fix it, I [nearly] gave up looking for help and decided to live with it. Most mechanics claimed it’s the solenoids acting up and there are like 2 or 4 pcs of those in any auto ‘box. Drawing on my motoring experience, I had my doubts. Another mechanic suggested servicing the valve body, change of oil, etc to the point I had the transmission recently checked for physical defects but found none.

The fix. It wasn’t until this Christmas holiday when my dad decided to look at the ECU (electronic control unit), the computer that manages the entire operation of the vehicle and often has capacity to learn and adapt to driving patterns. It was discovered that one of the two condensers had leaked onto the printed board and inadvertently shorted the circuit that controls the transmission functions. What a relief to have finally found the culprit the fixing it was next to nothing. A misdiagnosis isn’t only frustrating but can be a very costly affair pretty much like a wrongly diagnosed illness. Had I not been careful, the repair costs would have easily set me back a thousand dollars or more from experimenting efforts.

Although there’s a wealth of information on the web, it seemed no one has encountered a problem like this or published a report of one that I could find. I decided to post this article as a contribution to the growing list of problems owners encounter, no matter how unique it may be!

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