Mechanics: easiest car to work on (a response thread)

[AKADriver]

Surprised this hasn't showed up!

('99 Corolla)

I love when these come into the shop, its so simple.

I beat you to it! '98-'02 Corolla = beyond easy.

any old american muscle.. You have 3 wires and your done.. Tons of room in the engine bay.. Like I had a 79 firebird.. If it didn't run pretty much knew it was either fuel or spark. Now days theres 300 computers that controls it and your just along for the ride.

Er, you're saying that about a '79? Someone before you got to it must have removed about 50 feet of vacuum hoses first. '60s American cars were simple, but by the end of the '70s you had a nightmare of vacuum-operated emissions devices. About the only simple thing about a late '70s car is the ignition system, because that's new enough to have replaced the @#$% points and condensor with a breakerless electronic system. But the fuel/air systems were HORRIBLE. They used band-aid on top of band-aid to adjust the fuel-air mixture under certain driving conditions which EFI can easily do on the fly. When EFI was rolled out to the masses in the '80s it made most cars simpler.

It was pretty common to rip it all out and just run a standard carburetor and open air cleaner, but this isn't how they left the factory.

At the end of the day, EFI is not more complex in concept than a carburetor, but it is a different skill set to diagnose it.