Porsche Cayenne. Tough-guy look is above all else
This article is the first part of confessions from the depth of the Russian independent car service. The first, but not the last.
Meet the new member of The RUSSIANS tribe! The guru of car diagnostics and repairs Ilya "Nikolagrek" Nikolov!
Photo: Sergey Lenskiy
#porsche #cayenne #tech #garage #the_russians #russians
Oh, one more disappointment. This time it's Porsche Cayenne.
In general, I'm quite tolerant and not inclined to extremism or something. But I think, quite frankly, that something extremely brutal must be done to the hipster marketers, designers and other terrorists blowing up the automotive industry.
I now hesitate between two decisions, whether it's just to cut their hands off, blind them and pull out the tongues, or send them to boot camps for re-education and mastering a new profession of turner or caster. Just to improve the labor reserves for the industry. I am honestly sick and tired of people parasitic on human weaknesses without producing anything real!
So let's get back to the Cayenne that was brought to me for repairs.
A month of making love with this car from hell was the best proof of the marketers' trickery. According to them, regardless of the price, class and purpose, a vehicle should break up into pieces after 3-5 years, or better just disintegrate itself. Unfortunately, the science of forgery has not yet reached this technology level. So they have to get along with what they have.
Just do not tell me that the car was driven to complete wreck. Well, in fact that's partly true, and the current owner, an Azerbaijani guy, believes that the only service a car needs is a good wash and polish. Ok. But excuse me, what does this have to do with plastic that decomposes after ten years?
I've repaired many cars, both expensive and cheap, and every year I observe a conscious deterioration of quality. Programmed deterioration. When the price for the car does not correlate in any way with reliability and durability, and even with quality.
The marketers pay no attention of the above mentioned characteristics any more. Instead they take into account 1) His Majesty Design, 2) Tough-guy stuff 3) The Legend that has been in use for twenty years, while the current product has nothing to do with the things that made the brand a legend years ago.
When I saw the car for the first time it was lazy to accelerate, and the engine started only after a few tries. The owner of the car had a small store with cheap clothes at a consumer goods marketplace, and had no idea of what is inside of a car. When he faced the sluggish acceleration problem, he just called a fellow countryman, who, in his opinion, could help dealing with the issue. That other guy laid his hands on the bonnet and gave his verdict - the filter had probably got clogged. They went to the parts store and got back with an absolutely unexpected result. The men in the store said that a cartridge for the first gen Cayenne simple doesn't exist, so they have the only option to buy the filter assembly that also includes the pump for the mad price of 27 thousand rubles (almost $1000 on that moment). And, ok, the car has two pumps and they'd better buy them both. When the owner was about to hang himself, the sellers advised to wash the old filters, dry them and put back into the tank.
And this is the first point to salute the authors of the new auto service and repair conceptions!
And yes, the filter does have to be replaced with the pump - the assembly also includes the tank lid. But it remains unclear, why the duck then the filter housing can be disassembled. If there are no cartridges manufactured?
As I said before, there are two pumps in the tank, and the tank is shaped like a Xurjin. If you don't know what a Xurjin is, that's a pannier-style saddle bag thrown over the back of a donkey. Yes, the one that's jumping in a funny way when the rider is successful in begging the donkey to run a little. But in this case, the propeller shaft plays the role of the donkey's back in Cayenne.
12 pipes connect the two parts of the tank. They have a hell lot of valves. Probably only that madman who designed them really knows what each of the valves does. And, quite sure, there is no sane connection scheme showing the operation logic of the pumps.
The other Azerbaijani guy who was supposed to be a car gooroo carefully washed the filter with dishwashing liquid, dried it in the sun and reconnected the pipes as best as he could. And you should know that the each of the crazy things are the same, so that you can connect them in any order, they all fit each other. So I think there's no need to say that they all were crossed. When the car refused to start (just like a donkey, yeah) they sent for me.
At first I tried to bring the Cayenne back to life right in front of that first guy's clothes store. But it was August 2, and not too hot, so I suggested dragging that thing to my workshop.
At first I celebrated my birthday, then came the Russian Airborne Troops Day which is traditionally accompanied by Airborne traditional fountain diving (google it!) . So before getting back to work I had to have a couple of drinks in the morning to come to senses and deal with the barotraumas of the ears, but finally I was back at the workshop on the third or fourth of August.
I thoroughly examined the car. To begin with, not paying attention to the painful cries of the owner, I requested a new filter, or, actually, the filter assembly. However, the replacement did not bring any results. The car seemed good to go at first and then it started to blunt, sneeze and wouldn't go.
I began to understand the logic of the pump control, and I must say that it was designed by some aliens. The left pump delivers gasoline to the engine, but on the way the fuel passes through the right assembly. For this the left pump is connected to the right pump by a pipe with a pressure limiting valve. Excess fuel is discharged to the right side of the tank. And then, on demand, the fuel is pumped from the right part to the left. The left pump works constantly, and the right pump is activated by the ECU on demand when the acceleration is intense, or when there's a big difference in the levels of gasoline (both parts of the tank feature level sensors).
In addition the car had an alarm system that could block the gasoline pump. And I had doubts about the sanity of the thing. So now you can imagine the puzzle that I had to solve. The matter was complicated by the fact that the hatches in the body that offer access to the gasoline pumps are small and whatever you do, you just cannot look into the tank. No way.
So for the beginning I had to pull out both of the pumps and all the pipes to look at them. Pulling gasoline pumps out of the tank cannot be called a pleasant occupation as you have to bury your arm up to the elbow into gasoline, which eats the skin terribly. And not just once. Well, actually I did it eight times.
Next I tried to understand the logic. I also wanted to find out if there were any issues with the fuel system electric circuit. So I had to assemble a small chaos that included a whole lot of various gadgets. Let's count fingers: two pressure gauges - because there are two independent ramps, two multimeters for the supply lines of the pumps to see decrease in current, a diagnostic scanner, two LED testers for the pump control buttons.
I killed five days for experiments. Besides the crossed pipes there was a problem with the relay that blocked the fuel pump. During the digging in the wires, the damn alarm system locked the hood. So that I could not say I'm not having fun. As pushing the buttons on the remote control led to nothing, I had to take off the muzzle and killed the alarm system. Then I anyhow assembled all the pipes, pumps, wires and more and ...
The engine started! Then I made the final assembly and started trying all the acceleration modes including the most severe ones. However, in the process, the car broke down, stopped and started spraying fountains of coolant.
It was very unpleasant to report this new misfortune to the owner. He came to me because of the sluggish acceleration. And I ended breaking his car and trying to deceive him into parting with money to buy new coolant pipes. His cries could be heard as far as the nearest Metro station without a smartphone, so loudly he groaned.
But by the time I got absolutely sick and tired of the collapsing Cayenne and the greedy owner. The Azerbaijani guy calmed down instantly when I threatened that I would send him to hell with his car. He even came back with some baklava from Baku to settle the issue.
All ducked up, I had to disassemble the engine to the floor in order to understand only where the coolant came from. And then a surprise was waiting for me, kindly prepared by the hipsters from the car industry.
Imagine my surprise when a plastic tube that I casually drew out of the engine just fell apart in my hands and so did all the other plastic parts I touched!
That occurrence reinforced my view that the science of marketing has almost reached the point when a car at the end of the service life will simply decompose into Hydrogen, Oxygen and some other shit. By the way, it's a good idea with the decomposition - that will be the best for the ecology. And then they'll start making disposable plastic cars, and people will wonder what to do with them...
You won't believe me but all the cooling system tubes in the engine were made of shit mixed with clay! I'm not ducking exaggerating. In fact they were made of a sort of plastic that falls apart in ten years! I can't imagine any comparison for a plastic like that but dried shit! This is your marketing! Every tube in the cooling system fell apart after I touched it with a finger!!!! Not pliers, fingers! Do you hear this, hipsters?
I do not understand this. There's an engineer who is responsible for choosing materials for making engine cooling pipes. And he has the catalog in which there is data on all the materials. This is elementary! It's like asking a tailor to sew work wear of kashmir or lace. The tailor will say: "Are you nuts to ask for work wear made of lace?"
Why did not this happen to the engineer, I cannot understand. Could not he say "Are you crazy?" to some idiot who told him to make parts for a premium car from dried shit?
Didn't he have a manual on temperature degradation of materials?
Realizing that the hipsters from the German automotive industry would hardly have calmed down by making from shit only some miserable cooling tubes in the head, I decided to disassemble further. And then it was even worse. Deep in the block, there was another ducking heap of tubes, thicker but not less fragile. I only had to scrape them with a nail and they crumbled! I'm not exaggerating. A nail!
And when I tried to extract them, they successfully fell apart.
I understood the whole essence of manufacturing Cayennes from dried shit the next day, when, accompanied by the woeful cries of the Azerbaijani guy I went to a part store.
To be continued.
Join In
Comments (0)