This afternoon, I went to start up my Toyota Matrix after seeing a client and it had difficulty starting. While it did crank over, it sounded really really bad. Normally, I twist the key and the engine starts in 5 seconds. Today it took 15 and it struggled. That wasn’t a good sign as the last time it did this, I ignored it. That left me stranded in an intersection when the car died without warning. This time, I wasn’t going to ignore this. I didn’t want to take the chance that I was going to stranded someplace, so I went to the one place that I knew that I could get in to have it looked at and who would have a battery in stock. Canadian Tire.
Now let me say up front that Canadian Tire does not have the best reputation. There is a website for example that has people who rant about them as well as being referred to by people as “Crappy Tire.” But at least they would be able to diagnose this and let me know what I was dealing with. If I needed to do something other than replace the battery, I would take it to a Toyota dealer to have it addressed.
So I drove over to the nearest Canadian Tire and walked into the service department and requested a battery test. The service advisor asked me why I thought the battery was an issue. So I described the symptoms and he said “sounds like a starter motor to me.” That’s when I called him on it by pointing out the car would crank over eventually and a starter motor wouldn’t act like that if it were bad. You could see in his face that he knew that I was not going to have the wool pulled over my eyes. I then asked them to pull the car into a bay so that I see exactly what they were doing and I wanted to see the print out from the computer that tests the battery. They complied with my requests without an argument.
Let me stop here for a second and point something out. If you recall from my ongoing issues with oil consumption with this car, my Toyota dealer would not let me witness them fill the car with oil and seal it at the start of the oil consumption test, nor would they let me witness them measure the amount of oil that was left at the end of the test. Yet Canadian Tire allowed me to witness exactly what they were doing and to show the results to me straightaway. Read into that what you will.
So they tested the battery and it failed the test with having only 220 cold cranking amps when it should have 550 cold cranking amps. In English, cold cranking amps is the amount of amperage that the battery will put out when the engine is cold. If you live in a cold climate such as Canada, not having a battery capable of putting out the amperage that it should will leave you in the cold with a car that won’t start. This also explains why the car was having difficulty starting. There wasn’t enough amperage to start the car easily. Now, why would the cold cranking amps drop? Age is a factor. Car batteries tend to last 4 to 5 years. This battery that was in the car was about 3 years old. Combine that to the number one enemy of car batteries which is heat and it will explain why the battery was in this state.
So, I clearly had to replace the battery. I took the opportunity to replace it with an AGM battery. Specifically this one from Canadian Tire because it had a 5 year warranty. I wrote about AGM batteries about here, and it would be an upgrade as the battery that died was not an AGM battery. How much of an upgrade? I went from 550 cold cranking amps to 775 cold cranking amps at -18 degrees celsius. That’s something that I will appreciate when the weather is cold. When the weather isn’t cold, I will get 890 cranking amps. That’s great as well. It also has a reserve capacity of 120 minutes which is how long I can drive the car if the alternator fails before the battery runs out. Twenty minutes later I had a new battery and the car was back to normal.
What I found interesting about this experience is that Canadian Tire who don’t have the best reputation were fully transparent about what they were doing. Shockingly so actually. But I couldn’t get that from my Toyota dealer. You’d expect it to be the other way around, but it wasn’t. Perhaps the take home message is that I have the wrong dealer? Or perhaps the manufacturer, Toyota in this case, needs to encourage more transparency with their dealers? I’m not sure. But there’s something wrong when Canadian Tire can beat a car dealer when it comes to trust and transparency.
That’s some food for thought for my wife and I.
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A Tale Of Two Car Repair Establishments
This afternoon, I went to start up my Toyota Matrix after seeing a client and it had difficulty starting. While it did crank over, it sounded really really bad. Normally, I twist the key and the engine starts in 5 seconds. Today it took 15 and it struggled. That wasn’t a good sign as the last time it did this, I ignored it. That left me stranded in an intersection when the car died without warning. This time, I wasn’t going to ignore this. I didn’t want to take the chance that I was going to stranded someplace, so I went to the one place that I knew that I could get in to have it looked at and who would have a battery in stock. Canadian Tire.
Now let me say up front that Canadian Tire does not have the best reputation. There is a website for example that has people who rant about them as well as being referred to by people as “Crappy Tire.” But at least they would be able to diagnose this and let me know what I was dealing with. If I needed to do something other than replace the battery, I would take it to a Toyota dealer to have it addressed.
So I drove over to the nearest Canadian Tire and walked into the service department and requested a battery test. The service advisor asked me why I thought the battery was an issue. So I described the symptoms and he said “sounds like a starter motor to me.” That’s when I called him on it by pointing out the car would crank over eventually and a starter motor wouldn’t act like that if it were bad. You could see in his face that he knew that I was not going to have the wool pulled over my eyes. I then asked them to pull the car into a bay so that I see exactly what they were doing and I wanted to see the print out from the computer that tests the battery. They complied with my requests without an argument.
Let me stop here for a second and point something out. If you recall from my ongoing issues with oil consumption with this car, my Toyota dealer would not let me witness them fill the car with oil and seal it at the start of the oil consumption test, nor would they let me witness them measure the amount of oil that was left at the end of the test. Yet Canadian Tire allowed me to witness exactly what they were doing and to show the results to me straightaway. Read into that what you will.
So they tested the battery and it failed the test with having only 220 cold cranking amps when it should have 550 cold cranking amps. In English, cold cranking amps is the amount of amperage that the battery will put out when the engine is cold. If you live in a cold climate such as Canada, not having a battery capable of putting out the amperage that it should will leave you in the cold with a car that won’t start. This also explains why the car was having difficulty starting. There wasn’t enough amperage to start the car easily. Now, why would the cold cranking amps drop? Age is a factor. Car batteries tend to last 4 to 5 years. This battery that was in the car was about 3 years old. Combine that to the number one enemy of car batteries which is heat and it will explain why the battery was in this state.
So, I clearly had to replace the battery. I took the opportunity to replace it with an AGM battery. Specifically this one from Canadian Tire because it had a 5 year warranty. I wrote about AGM batteries about here, and it would be an upgrade as the battery that died was not an AGM battery. How much of an upgrade? I went from 550 cold cranking amps to 775 cold cranking amps at -18 degrees celsius. That’s something that I will appreciate when the weather is cold. When the weather isn’t cold, I will get 890 cranking amps. That’s great as well. It also has a reserve capacity of 120 minutes which is how long I can drive the car if the alternator fails before the battery runs out. Twenty minutes later I had a new battery and the car was back to normal.
What I found interesting about this experience is that Canadian Tire who don’t have the best reputation were fully transparent about what they were doing. Shockingly so actually. But I couldn’t get that from my Toyota dealer. You’d expect it to be the other way around, but it wasn’t. Perhaps the take home message is that I have the wrong dealer? Or perhaps the manufacturer, Toyota in this case, needs to encourage more transparency with their dealers? I’m not sure. But there’s something wrong when Canadian Tire can beat a car dealer when it comes to trust and transparency.
That’s some food for thought for my wife and I.
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This entry was posted on August 18, 2015 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Car. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.