What fails on ALL early 2000's Chevy SUV's!? CAR WIZARD shares what he's seen from the last 20 years

there is literally millions of these things on the road and you're looking to buy one possibly what can you expect to fail if you buy one let's get started [Music] so these are pretty popular whether it's suburban escalade tahoe sierra silverado there's so many iterations of this chassis all over really all over the world but especially all over america there's a lot of questions that can be had i'm looking to buy one of these what kind of things can i expect to fail we're going to go over some of those things today they really apply to the 99 to 2010 range once you get into 12 and 14 they start changing things there's things that are failing that are not common to these era so 99 to 2010 we're going to talk about what can you expect to fail and the things i'm going to show you today they are going to fail on one of these at 100 000 miles or more you can go ahead and budget it in in your annual budget or your monthly budget whatever it is that you do you can write these things down they will fail so let's start in the engine bay so go ahead and move this shroud out of the way this is the 5.3 liter with active fuel management and we'll talk about that also as well but probably not one of the ones i would want i would want an earlier one without active fuel management but anyways here's our intake manifold and if you follow it all the way back behind you'll see a shield back there behind that shield is an oil pressure sending unit you can't see it it's hard to see right now it's actually hard to change out i can do them without removing the intake and they're not fun these are known to fail and leak oil all over the back of the engine making it look like a rear main seal is leaking or something bad going on when it's not they're also known to fail and your oil pressure gauge will show zero or sometimes all the way past 80 even when the engine isn't even running it's a very common failure point i personally in the years when i was working at a different shop probably changed out 300 of them they fail over and over and over so if your oil pressure on one of these vehicles we just mentioned goes to zero it probably is not your engine just dying on you it's probably the oil pressure sending unit so if you're buying one of these you can budget that's going to fail it will fail if they fail it's typically a couple hundred bucks the cost of the sensor and some labor to get it replaced it's really not that big of a deal but plan on that happening the next thing we're going to look at is this 175 amp mega fuse right here you can actually see it's a little corroded on the connections already and we'll clean that for the customer before it leaves there's so many times that a customer with an escalade or tahoe or whatever complains of a no start condition i tell them to wiggle the connections there on that fuse and boom it starts it's just a common point to get corrosion there and it gets a poor connection if you have issues with it not starting wiggle the battery connections but definitely try that fuse right there usually what you have to do is take the nuts off clean all the connections real good with down to shiny metal put grease on it and put it all back together and it'll be good to go but that has happened so many times so plan for that luckily that last one if you had a shop do it it'd probably be fifty dollars or less but you could do it yourself for free so it really is not that big of an expense the next one is a huge expense if it fails underneath the intake on this one you can see that there's a plate that has little zigzags looks like a maze or a labyrinth with all kinds of little pathways through it those are oil ports for the active fuel management system we all know this to be problematic on chrysler vehicles just as well as chevrolet vehicles where lifters stick or they turn different things happen it just destroys the engine it's really a poor really a crappy design many people will electrically disable it like a tune or something they'll turn that feature off and some people will go as far as to just take the cylinder heads off take everything apart and go back together with standard lifters standard camshaft and just completely delete the active fuel management out if it has had poor oil change history you can bank on one of those failing on you starts ticking or clacking really loud or just dies on you so that is definitely a problem on these engines now you can budget for that if you want to go the full delete path at least four thousand dollars or more remember the heads have to come off this isn't like grandpa's chevy 350 where you can pull the cam out pretty easy you cannot get the lifters out of this vehicle without pulling the heads off you can plan on that as well try to get the earlier ones 2007-654 there is no active fuel management in those years and that would be where i would go here you can see the ac compressor and you can see that the little small serpentine belt already has cracks and as you can see the cracks and there's a little tensioner pulley there i promise you it will break on you i promise it will break typically on these vehicles like this when i see the cracks starting i either advise them to go ahead and put a tensioner and a belt on it or we go ahead and offer that service when we start seeing it to fail but usually what happens is the little tensioner and the little pulley seizes up and throws the belt and your ac quits and you really don't understand why or what happened all his nose my ac started blowing hot that is usually the problem on these and it happens so much it is really crazy so you can you can budget that that will happen luckily if it fails it's not a full ac system replacement it's just a pulley and a belt and it's really not that bad of a deal in the newer models they actually go to a stretch belt and they do away with the tensioner altogether and that pretty much solves the problem but these older ones with its own separate little tensioner very high failure rate so we can see here there's these little black block shaped things those are ignition coils there's four on this side and four on the other side and there's red ignition wires that go from the coil to the spark plug if you get a misfire typically it's because it needs a tune-up the spark plugs are so worn out that they've killed one of the coils because the gap is too large and you would replace that coil and also probably do a tune-up with all plugs and all wires another thing i can promise you is if you do a tune-up and you go to pull the spark plug wires off they will break there is no way around it they always break they get so much heat from the exhaust manifold right there that no matter what you do they just crumble they just break or the wire pulls out whenever i do a tune-up and a coil on one of these i quote all eight plugs all eight wires and the particular coil that failed but that is a common issue on these a coil fails because the tune-up's never been done typically at 100 120 000 miles is probably time for plugs and no don't just do one plug and one wire really you can't even buy just one wire anyways they're not going to sell you just one wire but typically you can expect that to happen especially at 100 000 miles it's just about time for plugs you just bought this vehicle and all of a sudden starts misfiring it happens so much typically the cost on that could easily be four or five hundred dollars you got the coil the ignition wires all eight plugs and the labor it can easily add up and you got sales tax which no one ever thinks about sales tax adding 50 bucks to their total so if you're somewhat mechanically inclined this is another area where you can fix it yourself you can get the parts and take care of it and negate the cost of paying a shop to do it so definitely an option there you see those rusty little bolts by the spark plug there the exhaust manifold bolts look at there guys it's already got a broken bolt head on it you can see the gap already starting on here that exhaust manifold bolt the head is broken off this is a job that's usually 50 50 whether i get to do it or not it's so common it's another one you can guaranteed you're going to have at least one broken exhaust manifold bolt on these they put very small bolts on a high stress high heat area i don't know why the engineering did that but they don't last they break and then you start getting the exhaust noise and so many times i tell them you know to fix your exhaust leak i'm going to have to remove the entire exhaust manifold which means probably more bolts are going to break and for every one that i have to drill it out of the cylinder head it's a half an hour every time one snaps that's another half an hour and if another one snaps even if we heat the bolts or use pb blaster or different things it doesn't matter they're so brittle from being heat treated basically that they just break and when people hear about half an hour tallying up so much they're like you know what i'll just deal with the exhaust leak forget it so that's definitely something to look for if you're looking at one of these check all the exhaust manifold bolts you need to be careful if it's if it's extremely bad it could cause some issues with o2 sensor readings but if it's just a light leak or this one's not leaking at all you you can get by for a little while back under the intake again although there are no knock sensors there there is the afm manifold this is the area where the knock sensors are located on the older models 2002 three four five six seven these frequently go bad you get a code for knock sensor signal issues in the in those days they put foam blocks underneath the intake manifolds to keep debris or animals out and it actually backfired on them it would trap water in there and the water would get into the nox sensors and just rust them into oblivion and ruin the wiring harness as well that's an intake off job and you have to replace the nox sensors it can be a few hundred three four hundred dollars to do that job but if you're looking at one of these older models and it has a knock sensor code you can go ahead and budget the intake has to come off and that is extremely common as well i've probably done at least 100 of them 100 sets of them a lot so we're not doing a full review of the car we're just showing things that are going to fail and one of them is the instrument cluster gauges those are so common to fail that they're actually mobile technicians that go around and fix them wherever you're at whether it's at home or at your place of business or where you work those people wouldn't exist if this wasn't a common problem what happens is your gauges will read way out of whack it'll say you're going 120 miles an hour when you're not even moving or your voltage gauge quits working and what they are the little stepper motors that actually move the needles fail the whole cluster has to come out and it can be rebuilt fairly quickly we just had them done on hovey's beautiful suburban that teal green what was it called riptide blue riptide blue yes the suburban that he has that's so nice that's been fixed and it was done very very quickly so that's something you can expect to fail yes the hvac system you've seen in the red truck where we had to replace the actuators while it was all apart all inside this dash is the cheapest ac actuators that anyone has ever made whether it be for the blend door or the recirculate door or the mowed door they always fail and they start going click click click click click click click and you can hear them when you turn on your car and it's annoying or either that or they just don't move at all anymore you go to turn the dial to temperature or mode and nothing happens it just stuck and sometimes it is a dash out job but sometimes you can also get from underneath or several that are easy to get to if you're looking at one of these years i mentioned sierra silverado tahoe any of these you can also budget you will be replacing hvac actuators i promise you will so there's only a couple of things in the interior and again you could go on for hours about things that fail on any vehicle we're just getting some of the high spots of things that i have replaced multiple hundreds of times so that's pretty much it for the interior let's go ahead and get this thing in the air [Music] we're not doing a full review like i mentioned we're just showing some of the common items and again you guys can probably list a few more in the comments section that weren't brought up in the video that are also common failure points and let other people know but like i said i'm mentioning the things that i have seen so many times that i don't even have to it's just like on the top of my head so we'll start right here by the radiator you can see it already has brand new transmission cooler lines right there it's because they always fail they start leaking where it cramps and drips all over the ground you'll have red fluid on your driveway they all will fail i've done duramax ones i've done the 6 liter the 5.3 the v6s it doesn't matter they will all fail in the lifetime of the vehicle so that's definitely something to check for leaks and like i mentioned the little ac tensioner we just mentioned a minute ago there it is at a different angle it's just literally two bolts and you have to take the main belt off as well but it's not a big job so just let you guys see that the next one is the oil cooler block off plate which is these two bolts right here these are notorious for pouring oil all over the oil filter and all the way down and constantly people are getting quoted a new rear main seal replacement when actually it wasn't the rear main seal it's just this little gasket heavy duty vehicles will have oil lines going to an oil cooler but this one's a block off plate but regardless if there's a cooler or not that is a very very common leak spot on these it's one thing to be careful with on these is oil leaks right in this area they can be from multiple different things can be valve cover gaskets can be the oil pressure sending unit we talked about it could be that oil cooler block off plate i just showed you there's several areas there that you definitely want to check before you start condemning a rear main seal or something like that however the oil pan gasket and also the rear main seal do fail on these as well as the oil pickup tube o-ring which can give zero oil pressure or very low oil pressure when it's warmed up the pickup tube o-ring is literally just on the other side of the oil pan in the front of the engine right there it's actually not hard to get to in these two-wheel drive setups but in four wheel drive they can be very difficult it's literally just right in right in on the front of the oil pan there it's where the pickup tube mounts to the oil pump the oil pan itself can also be leaking and making a big mess it's also a common leak point but not as common as the oil puller block off plate now this is not a four wheel drive but if it was another common leak point on these would be differential seals on either side i've replaced so many sets of those with the cv shaft comes down you pop out the flanges put the new seals in sometimes they can be done in the vehicle it's not that big of a deal but if it's a four wheel drive check the differential it's probably leaking i can almost promise you it probably is okay show of hands how many of you have the aira 2000 2010 chevy truck and your abs and brake light is on you guys know i have a black ss chevy out out the side of the building here that i bought from hoovey from hoover's garage and it's its lights are on almost all of them are and the reason why is the abs module which is underneath the car underneath where the driver sits on the frame typically the solder joints inside the control module fail or they crack and it loses power and it shuts down and then you get to abs light you can usually remove these little screws and take it apart and re-solder the circuits and fix it i've done a lot i mean a lot of those myself i re-soldered them put it back together and amazingly the abs light goes off it's happy again that is a massive massive failure point on these this is a 4l60e and if you're towing a trailer in overdrive shame on you you're going to ruin your transmission let's get this thing on the ground and i'll tell you a little bit more about that transmission situation towing anything two thousand pounds or more is always harder on your vehicle and there's the common misconception that the 4l60e is a pilot trash transmission it might as well be a grenade with a pin that just drops off at about a hundred thousand miles and it blows up on you like clockwork but i have found over the years in working in a mechanic shop or owning a mechanic shop ninety percent of the time it's because someone was really working their engine while it was in overdrive not in tow haul mode but just in normal driving overdrive like they're cruising on the highway unloaded i usually trick the customer they'll come in and say man this thing is the transmission's going out with shuttering and now the transmission is shelled out and these things are piles of junk so i say you probably threw it and drive and hit the highway right all the way on your trip using overdrive and they're like well yeah and i'm like there you go you blew up your transmission guy what do you mean i blew it up i said yeah the torque inverter lock up or the little clutches inside the torque converter on these are not designed to haul loads and put the brunt of the load of towing on those tiny little clutches it will burn them up and it sends the debris into the transmission and then it just scores and destroys everything else my mentor the guy i used to work for told me if you're ever towing with a chevy transmission any of the newer 4l60es always always have the overdrive turned off yes you're going to get worse gas mileage but i guarantee you the gas that you will lose is going to be way cheaper than a new transmission these things are not designed to tow in torque converter lock up they're not so you can really prolong the life of these 4l60es if you keep that in mind you can about double the life of your transmission that way now i could ramble on and more and more i could talk for another hour about the things that commonly fail and like i said you guys can let us know in the comments some of the things that you guys have seen that have failed on these but these are some of the ones like i mentioned that i've seen so many times it's almost like i wake up in the night and go abs module afm delete that's just there's so many of them so that's why you wake me up in the middle of the night with random phrases yes that's probably why thanks now are these a pile of trash vehicle because of that no no they're not because what i just did to this suburban i could do to any car on the face of this planet every car has high failure rates of this or that even a toyota but a toyota has much less so are still a good vehicle when the things do fail they're usually not seven thousand dollars to fix them and they're usually can be done by someone who's a novice somewhat mechanically inclined they can usually fix it themselves now you can actually watch youtube videos and get instructions on how to work on it yourself now we don't do that here on this channel this is a review channel this is a channel about what it's like to run a shop the common failure points of vehicles things of that nature that's pretty much what we do anymore if you're curious what kind of tools that we use in this shop check my amazon affiliate link in the description below we get a small cut and we really appreciate it and make sure to hit the subscribe button because the schedule is full all the way to november we have cars coming in left and right that means more videos for you guys thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Car Wizard

Views: 598,848

Keywords: car wizard, david long, hoovies garage, tyler hoover, car issues with tyler hoover, omega auto clinic, car repair, car maintenance, Hoovie, mechanic, Car issues, BendPak, Car trek, Car, Repair, 5.3, afm, active fuel management, chevy, chevrolet, suburban, escalade, tahoe, sierra, silverado

Id: 5mldjQJS-9w

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022