Assessment of Used Vehicles

Check a used vehicle engine (gasoline or diesel) for mechanical integrity before you buy it for resale. Don’t waste your money on a used car that has mechanical problems – or reduce the bid to an acceptable level in light of the issues. Mechanical problems cost MUCH more to fix than electrical problems.

With a hand-held oscilloscope & FirstLook®, one can determine the basic integrity of rings, valves, gaskets, and fuel injectors in a few minutes by a power-brake look at the exhaust. FirstLook® at the oil dipstick tube identifies if the engine has ring ‘issues’.

 
Increase the value of a used car you want to sell by knowing it has mechanical integrity so you can offer a limited warranty. Ten minutes might get you $500 more! A used vehicle engine of high integrity can be warranted – worth at least the cost of warranty insurance.

Diagnosis

Get faster and more accurate diagnosis with fewer “well, let’s try …”s; and fewer returns to the shop! Some tests that normally take 6hrs take only 30 minutes using SenX sensors..

Whether the engine has triggered an OBD code or not, if you have a physical integrity problem, FirstLook®  can be used to quickly  ’triage’ the engine: fuel or oil additive cleaner is all that is needed? Looks like injectors or fuel system? Looks like a head job? Or pull the engine for crankcase and piston work?

Make the customer more satisfied by fast, accurate diagnosis of mechanical problems.

By attaching a spark plug trigger (inductive pickup or COP probe), one can pinpoint the offending cylinder(s) to better assess the extent of the work required.

Shop Productivity – Less use of mechanic’s time and bay time to perform diagnosis.

Reduce Total Cost of Ownership

Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) results in preventative maintenance on the vehicle when evidence recommends it, preventing catastrophic failure in the field when extraction is expensive and repair very expensive. Personnel inconvenience and casualties are not included in these calculations but are very real, especially in combat situations.

Routine FirstLook check at oil changes can identify failing components.

Improved Fleet Mileage

Recognize dirty injectors, valves, and rings to achieve gasoline savings by cleaning. Compromised gaskets can also be a cause for loss of fuel economy. These conditions are very visible with the FirstLook® sensors.

Every 200,000 miles, on-road vehicles would get up to 12% mileage improvement by cleaning injectors and cleaning carbon off valves and rings.  This steady-state assumes no new vehicles are in the fleet.

Environmental Quality

Reduce greenhouse & noxious emissions by better combustion & better mileage (less fuel burned). This can affect the bottom line via annual vehicle testing and penalties for non-compliance. This is most significant for heavy vehicles.
 

Keeping engines in top condition also reduces NOx, CO and CO2 emissions; this results in reduced time for ‘fixes’ to pass state emissions tests – and possibly reduces cost of fines.

Other benefits include possible income from Carbon Trading and SmartWay compliance supporting investment loans.

Fuel cost elements are not repeated here because that is covered in the Fuel Economy Benefits calculation.

Additives and Service Center

In the last decade, the average auto age has gone from 9.8 years to 11.4 years (2002-2013) requiring more aftermarket business.

If your business is routine maintenance of vehicles from the public, you might use SenX evidence of dirty rings and valves to cross-sell additives to clean the engine.  In addition, anytime you can show the owner that their engine has a significant problem (or doesn’t have a significant problem), the customer will increase their trust in you.

If evidence shows the condition of dirty injectors or carbon buildup on the valves or rings, many customers will see the benefit of a cleaning treatment.

Quality

Verify that repairs have indeed been done correctly and solve the problem before re-installing to vehicle or returning to customer. Ensuring healthy engine quality also yields increased warranty profit on used vehicles (especially after an engine rebuild). A few minutes every time can prevent a few – but very expensive mistakes.

A study * of new marine diesel engines (341 vessels) found that 50% of ‘new’ engines (new, or after rebuild) fail within the first 10,000 hrs of operation (nominal life of 30,000 hours before rebuild); of those, 75% failed due to piston, rings, jacket & liner, exhaust valves, crankshaft & bearings, and FO pump. These failures caused delays of 6941 hrs (110 hr average). Root cause reported was lack of quality control before commissioning.

* INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON COMBUSTION ENGINES, Paper No. 95, Analysis of Reliability/Failure of Newly Built Diesel Engines,  Akira Kubo et al., CIMAC Congress 2004, Kyoto Reduce cost by detecting inadequate repairs before returning vehicle to customer (or rebuilt engine to vehicle).

Educational

Using FirstLook®, students visualise and learn the basic mechanism of the Internal Combustion (IC) engine and the significance of compromised components on its performance. This is equivalent to increased class time of at least 1 credit course, learning more during the educational experience.

It may seem strange to quantify the value of the increased understanding but this aspect is something that has been stressed to SenX Technology from our education clients.