had one ... but the doors fell off

I'm still trying to figure out what the phrase "100% better" means. Can someone give an example with numbers ilustrating something being 100% better than something else.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my adddress with the letter 'x')

100%???? This whole paragraph is nothing but horses*it and bull cr*p. Get real!

Sounds like a sour-grapes attitude from someone with a big, BIG chip on his shoulder as well as a BIG ax to grind.

Millions???????????? No, in actuality the number is around 610,000..........and the wheels falling off is one problem, not the entire vehicle. In reality Chrysler looked in their crystal ball when you went to buy your T&C and they said, "We will sell this one vehicle that will have virtually everything go wrong with it to this guy, Peter Denyer".

Call it what you want, but he is very close to being correct. The only thing that I differ on is that the independents can charge whatever the market will bear. If they think Chilton time for a particular job is too low, they can bump it to what they think is fair and then see if the customer will buy it.

Denny

statistics are a wonderful thing - most cars are pretty good and you get what you paid for. Some are even better than that, some are worse. Depending on where you are on that great statistical bell curve, you could end up with an absolute dog, or a car that lasts forever. No crystal ball needed - random chance gets you.

As an example my ex-neighbor has a GM pickup built at least 40 years ago

- all his buddies on the assembly line knew it was his and paid extra care to make things as perfect as they could. He never had a lick of problem all time I knew him and he claimed he never did have any serious problem. Ended up giving it to his granddaughter when he felt too old to drive it safely any more. Obviously something to the far right of that statistical bell curve.

My van, on the other hand...

Peter

RPhillips47 wrote:

Nope... Never have.

Yep, it's too bad you had to go through that. And, it's understandable why you may not purchase another Chrysler product as a result.

I believe they reported 46 occurrences out of 600,000 vehicles...if my memory serves me correctly (I'm sire if it's not right, someone here will know the real numbers). I wonder what the average is for this situation (yes wheels fall off of other cars as well..so there is a average)

It means the same thing as "New and Improved".

Hey I think the center bolt on the rear hinge is some kind of shear pin, it looks like it's intended to break and allow the door to pivot up with out falling off. I'd stop by a bone yard and pick up another hinge for a buck or so.

KS

It was his opinion, therefore it means nothing. That was what I suspected, but he confirmed it above.

Matt

Except that his buddies had very little to do with it. The far bigger affect is the components that are put on the vehicle and this isn't an assembly line issue.

Yes, it sounds like he was one of the lucky ones that got a vehicle where all of the parts were at the center of the specification limits.

Matt

I have one of these as well - a 1995 T&C with 105K miles on it. We bought it used. And nothing like this has happened to it in it's history except for the trans. It did have it's trans replaced by the previous owner. However trans failures are endemic to this year and model and are to be expected. If it was rebuilt by a competent rebuilder in the last

4 years it will have the updates in it that will keep it from dying prematurely in the future.

Car dealers rarely see anything other than warranty work. And just look at the latest recall on Chrysler products that was just announced. The numbers are something like 600,000 vehicles at $1,200 a pop, or a grand total of 720 million dollars could potentially be poured into Chrysler dealership service departments (if everyone took their vehicle back in for the recall) in the next few years. Do you really think these folks NEED your business?

It is a bullshit solution. Is is basically a "we can't figure out why it's not keeping alignment so we are just going to replace some expensive front end component to make the customer go away" kind of solution.

They should have checked the frame of this vehicle. You may have a body weld that broke somewhere.

If it keeps having serious steering problems after repeated realignments and throwing racks at it, then they need to look at what the rack and suspension parts are bolted to - the unibody. If this is shifting around, no alignment will hold.

Never had that happen to mine. If it did I would be going through all the accessories and tensioner and such to make sure they were all in alignment, as well as making sure someone didn't leave a guard off - sometimes snow pushed up into the belt will do it, if a guard is missing.

And there's a lot of crappy replacement tensioners on the market. just replacing the belt without digging for why it came off is the wrong way to do it.

If this is the tensioner your talking about the problem is elsewhere.

I think this is due to possibly bad habits. I noticed those hinges myself - the sheet metal they are attached to is not very strong - and I trained my wife to when she was opening the door to never let it swing out all the way against the stop. (she is the primary driver) In short, when you open the door you don't open it and fling it open so it bangs against the stop then kicks back into your leg. Instead you open it with your hand on the door and you open it all the way then you let go of the door handle when the door has stopped moving BEFORE you get out of the van. And when entering the van you do not open the door and fling it open either.

I also have to wonder if the rainwater is being properly routed on your van - perhaps a piece of weatherstrip is letting rain pour down over the hinges and there is rust there your not seeing.

Those hinge pins are hardened steel or are supposed to be. I can't help but wonder if someone at one point replaced them with mild steel bolts. For one thing they shouldn't shear off, if anything they would fracture. Maybe you got a bad batch.

Did you have a body shop fix the crease on the rear tail? Maybe they took the door off for some reason.

I have an 81 datsun that has never had it's doors fall off. By contrast I have an 84 olds that broke a drivers door hinge once. It happens.

Can't

An alignment is a preventative maintainence item, it is not something that you get only when the car starts pulling to the right or the left or some such. You must be of the camp that thinks an alignment is only to be gotten when there's a problem, to say something like this.

That leads me to believe that your T&C only sees the inside of an alignment shop when there is a steering problem. If that is the case and your seeing such gross misalignment problems to the point that they affect steering with that high a frequency, I would think that your front end unibody is cracked. Perhaps a stress fracture or perhaps the welding robot that was putting the thing together burped when it was doing a seam, perhaps a corrosion issue, but if the steering is going that bad that frequently, you need to get the thing on a frame rack and have them check the frame to make sure it's not gradually spreading apart.

People rarely take their vehicles to a dealership service place when there is a body panel failure, like a busted hinge. Why would a service manager at a dealership see a lot of these?

If the body on your van was straight and the engine still runs well I would consider driving my 81 Datsun down there, parking it on the side of the road with a sign on it saying "Free Car" and leave the title and keys in the glovebox, then drive your van back. Even just having it sitting in the driveway as a parts source would be worth it.

I live in Oregon which is the same deal. But what I think you are suffering from is simply nothing more than piss-poor auto repairs.

Look, one of the fundamental things that I have found with car repairs is that is it more common for the failed part to be caused by some other failed thing.

Take a water pump leak. People think "Oh, the water pump just wore out" They don't consider that the antifreeze in the engine is 8 years old and while it still is a 50-50 mix according to the antifreese hydrometer, by now all the lubricant and anti-corrosion additives are completely shot. Hell, there's wrecking yards here that give away used antifreeze for free. With antifreeze running at $8 a bottle, I know darn well that there's people going to those yards for "free' antifreeze.

Lots and lots of repairs are like this. Hell we see this in emissions work all the time. People can't pass emissions so they go throw a new catcon on the car and pass emissions, then figure they fixed the problem. Meanwhile the vacuum leak that is causing their engine to run lean and thus burn up the catcon, remains unrepaired. Or, people get a code for a failed EGR valve and they go replace the EGR valve and ignore the O2 sensor, which has gotten lazy. Don't they know the computer uses the o2 output to determine if the egr valve is functioning? Apparently not.

In your case, you have a front end problem. I can almost guarentee that if they have thrown 4 racks into this vehicle in 100,000 miles then the problem isn't the rack, no matter what they say. Perhaps what the real problem is, is making the rack wear out prematurely, or perhaps the shop is too stupid or lazy to bother trying to figure out the real problem and the racks are actually not bad. But, you can believe that the root problem has NEVER been solved here. These failing racks - if they really failed - are a symptom of the real cause.

You need to visit a wrecking yard and get the complete hinge and pin from a van with a smashed tailgate. Don't try fixing this with a drill and some dimestore hardware store bolt.

Ted

Nate, would you just please shut the f*ck up!! Do you want to ruin it for the rest of us who never buy new vehicles? If the new car purchasers ever figure this out we are going to be back were we were in 1970, stuck buying used up 30 year old crap.

Ted

I can't help but wonder if that Olds was of the X-body type. The '80 Chevy Citation that I bought new had one of the driver's door hinges come apart (hinge plate separated from the body) - combination of weak design and a weld at the low end of the bell curve that ate up what little design safety factor there was. An awful experience getting any help from GM on getting htat fixed.

Although I get beat up pretty regularly on this ng for urging people to have their alignment shop provide them with 'before' and 'after' printouts on their alignments, this is an absolutely perfect example of where that would, if not provide the precise root cause of the problem, at least *greatly* narrow down componenets or areas to focus on for the cause and fix. But what do I know. 8^)

Heh heh! That's probably to avoid having to pay a third-party a "hazardous wast disposal fee" to haul it off.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my adddress with the letter 'x')