The day a 2014 Ford Transit van taught me to always check the software first

I was at a shop in Tacoma about five years ago, working on a van with a rough idle. I spent two hours checking the usual stuff, plugs, coils, vacuum lines. A guy who had just started with us walked over and asked if I'd checked for any TSBs or software updates. I hadn't. We plugged in the scanner, found a PCM update from Ford that fixed the exact issue. Now I look that up before I even grab a wrench. How many hours do you think we all wasted before these updates were so easy to find?

3 comments

3 Comments

grant_wilson721mo ago

Man, that hits close to home. I remember helping a buddy with his old laptop that kept crashing. We spent a whole weekend taking it apart, checking the fan, re-pasting the processor, the whole deal. Another friend finally asked if we'd just tried reinstalling the operating system. One download later, it ran perfectly. Felt like such a fool for all that wasted time. It's always the simple software fix you overlook when you're deep in the hardware weeds.

the_christopher1mo ago

My uncle's 2012 desktop had the same thing, @grant_wilson72. We replaced the power supply before I noticed the hard drive cable was just loose. Two days of work for a ten second push.

the_ben15d ago

Totally see this everywhere. You'll spend an hour looking for your phone while you're talking on it. Or drive back home to check if you locked the door when you definitely did. Our brains just fixate on the complicated answer first. It's like we're trained to expect the worst case, so we miss the easy button right in front of us.