FIX IT!!!
C
ars are mechanical things with many, many moving parts. As they get older (in miles, not years) these parts wear out with increasingly dramatic effects. Some people feel that a car is unreliable or of poor quality when they get hit with a $500+ repair bill. There are unavoidable feelings of betrayal when this happens, ("I changed your $%@#@! oil every 3000 miles! I always went light on the accelerator until your engine was fully warmed up!") but people who "live" by their cars and put a lot of miles on them each year as I do (over 31,000 miles last year) not only see these things coming, but they accept them with resign. The important thing to do is find problems and fix them before they leave you stuck by the side of the road somewhere.Not that I expect you to live by the same mantra, I'm just relating what went through my head when I was slapped with almost $600 worth of repair bills for my car!!! Without further adieu, here's what I've had to fix on my Corsica in the last month and what's coming up next, the hope being that I can help you troubleshoot problems on your cars by relating problems I've had with mine.
-Torque-Converter Control Solenoid: This quite possibly the most misunderstood transmission failure that occurs in GM front-wheel drive cars, despite the fact that it is one of the most common. When this $20 electrical part goes, the symptom is dramatic: in heavy traffic or on a hot day, your car will start bucking and stall out like a manual-transmission equipped car that has been accidentally left in gear at a red light. Of course, the only way to drive the car is to shift into neutral whenever you stop and then back into drive when it's time to take off. Many, many mechanics waste customers' money by attempting to treat these symptoms as a common stalling issue. They hook up to the diagnostic computer (a bad TCC solenoid may not ever register any trouble codes), they clean fuel injectors, replace fuel filters and pumps, they check electrical parts, they change spark plugs and spark plug wires; all to no avail- none of those fixes will even mitigate the symptoms of a bad TCC solenoid.
When they do find the problem, many mechanics try to fix a bad TCC solenoid by disconnecting it. This will work on older (pre-1995) Corsicas that do not have the 3100 V6 engine or the OBD-II computer system. The consequence is that your torque converter in your transmission will never lock at highway speeds, costing you a few miles-per-gallon. Personally, I feel that for $200 or so, you should just replace the part and have your car operate the way the engineers who designed it intended.
On newer Corsicas, the choice is made for you. The OBD-II and the electronic 4T60-E transmission will, much like too-smart-for-his-own-good HAL in the sci-fi movie, detect when you're trying to mess around with their parts. Disconnecting the solenoid will light up your "Service Engine Soon" light and it will stay on. HAL isn't cheap to fix either; this solenoid is a $400 fix on newer Corsicas.
I have not been able to see the GM publication that details exactly what the consequences of driving around like this are, but I do know that GM strongly recommends AGAINST disabling TCC on any car equipped with it. Needless to say, if a mechanic tells you that he knows a cheap fix for your post-1994 Corsica's faulty TCC, chances are he either doesn't know what he's talking about or he's planning to really rape your car's electronics. Either way, go elsewhere for service.
Alternator- An open-and-shut case for me. A few weeks ago it started to make a whooshing sound like a Hoover vacuum cleaner; a clear case of faulty bearings. A remanufactured one ran me about $120.
Recall- Take your 1996 Corsica to Chevrolet as soon as you can see fit to have a manufacturing defect corrected free of charge. A wiring problem causes the interior lights to switch on randomly. This is recall number 98-0-11. If you're not the original owner of your Corsica, you may not have been notified.