The Power of Automatic Transmission Reset: A Game-Changer for Car Enthusiasts

I've had my fair share of experience with automatic transmissions, and I can confidently say that resetting them has been a lifesaver. There's something truly magical about taking a transmission that was acting up and turning it into a dream machine once again. It's like magic, I tell you! And the best part is that it's not just limited to repairing faulty transmissions; even with perfectly good cars, a reset can make all the difference.

I've had customers come to me with cars that were still under warranty, but they'd been acting up in strange ways. They'd reset them, and voilà! The car would run like new again. I remember one customer who came to me with a car that was having transmission issues after just a few months of ownership. I told him, "Reset it, and see what happens." Sure enough, once the transmission was reset, the problems disappeared. It's as if the machine had been holding onto some kind of glitch or bug, and resetting it cleared it out.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "How does this work?" Well, my friends, it's quite simple really. Modern cars use complex computer systems to manage their transmissions. These computers can get stuck on certain settings or protocols, causing the transmission to act up. By resetting the transmission, we're essentially reprogramming the computer to start fresh and optimize its performance.

But here's the thing: not all transmissions need a reset. In fact, some cars may not even require one if you're simply looking for optimal performance. For example, if you're running high-performance fuel injectors or have made other adjustments to your car's engine, you may not need to reset the transmission. However, if you've changed out components or performed repairs that affect the transmission's operation, a power balance is often necessary.

One of the most useful tools for understanding and resetting transmissions is the automatic transmission scan tool. This device allows you to access the transmission's computer system and diagnose any problems. It can also be used to perform software updates and adjustments, which can help optimize performance and prevent issues down the line. And the best part? These tools are relatively affordable, with prices starting at around $700.

Now, I know some of you may be thinking, "But I'm not a car expert; what if I mess something up?" Fear not, my friends! While it's true that working on transmissions can be complex, these tools make it accessible to anyone willing to learn. And with practice and patience, even the most experienced technicians can benefit from using them.

Of course, there are those who may still prefer traditional repair methods – nothing beats the feeling of getting your hands dirty and fixing things with a wrench. But the truth is, modern technology has made it easier than ever to keep our cars running smoothly. And what's more, these tools can help you understand how your car works, giving you a newfound appreciation for its inner workings.

As I sat in my friend's car, listening to him fiddle with his iPhone (yes, he was an old-timer who still used manual updates!), I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement about the possibilities these tools offer. The owner was curious about whether or not he should keep the transmission reset tool – and after using it himself, he decided that it was worth keeping around for future repairs.

Ultimately, resetting transmissions is a game-changer for car enthusiasts. Not only can it resolve problems with faulty transmissions but also provide a new level of performance and control. Whether you're a seasoned mechanic or just starting out, these tools are an essential addition to any toolkit – and who knows? You might even discover a new passion in life.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enrev up your engines all right i got a viewer came over today he's got a big ford pickup truck four by four and he bought himself one of these x tool d8s costs him about 700 bucks he wants to know how it works how to use it so you're gonna learn along with him so you plug it in like any scan tool we'll start with a diagnostic and we know it's a ford so we'll go america ford usa and we'll do automatic detection because it's a relatively modern vehicle it came up super fast got a good chip on it 2010 5.4 liter three valve engine there's a whole bunch of stuff okay this is a basic one so it doesn't have the factory equipment for that and we will do an automatic scan you see how fast that thing is look at it it is whipping through this stuff quick this thing's had some wear on it's got 137 000 miles as we can see there's no dtc's on anything so it's in excellent shape but of course there's a lot more than that so let's check out the live data we'll start it up starts right up sounds like a typical ford v8 you can see it's got 289 points of data so you're going to get a lot of information on this thing so what we want to do is start looking at it and they're nice because they're color coded blue is normal you see oddball stuff different colors you know something's wrong so let's start looking through this we're putting out 14.2 volts you know it's charging barometric pressure there's an awful lot of information you get down there at temperature dual engine cooling temperature see the throttle control it's all electronic is working quite well because it says desired 2.75 and it's 2.7574 it changes up and down with it and it's almost exactly the same let's say you had a problem with your electronic throttle say that desired throttle it was 2.67 the actual was like 2.0 or 3.5 you'd know there's a problem in that system that's where these tools are invaluable there's all kinds of information you learn what it means you're going to be able to analyze the car a lot better and yeah it's a lot of information but it is color coded we'll scroll down some more there's no faults that's fine tells you the fuel level now that's a fuel gauge 51.99 50 point it sloshes around a little we don't need that much accuracy and it shows you the fuel rate pressure which is great around 40 psi it's normal for one of these back in the day you had to take the fuel line off the fuel injector rail get a special adapter put it on run it get a fuel gauge with a long hose to come into the cab here drive it around and look this has the information the fuel pressure's here you could graph it whatever you want to do but you don't have to go through all of that crap to analyze now sure if you go way back they actually made these things easier to work on and that they had inverted bicycle schrader valves on the line and you'd get a fuel gauge and it would just screw right on and you could find the pressure real easy by just like checking your tire pressure right but they stopped putting those on years ago and it pissed me off because it made working on cars a lot harder you have to buy an adapter on a yacht to attach it but now we can do it electronically without having to hook anything up oh that's another good thing you can use these for see if your fuel pump's going out 82 degrees if that was getting really hot you'd know there was a problem and then there's all this transmission stuff you can look at when you're driving you think you got a training problem you can road test it and graph all this information and again it shows the charge in 14.487 that's working good and there's no fault in the oxygen sensors and it's pretty good it's only subtracting 0.13 fuel which isn't much that's almost perfect here it's only subtracting 0.48 again minus 01.161 it's almost perfect oh it was perfect there it's perfect again then it went 0.000 it's not perfect it's 1 1 000's off every once in a while when you consider it's got 137 000 miles and it's still running almost perfect hey we're talking lexus not a ford truck but the ford trucks running the same these big trucks were made the last yes they're gas hogs he got 11 miles a gallon driving in here that's just what a big truck is gonna do they're big they're heavy this baby weighs 6 400 pounds dry and it's so tall with a big camper on the back the only place he can get it washed is that the truck car washing he's wooden behind these 18 wheelers to wash his truck so they're big trucks you know but this one's still running quite well all right we'll keep going and here we have as you can see if you have a problem with your fuel injectors how are you going to tell which one it is well it tells you one faults when they have it for all eight injectors this has no faults it's running perfectly but if there was you can look at all that information that's where these machines come in handy if you learn how to use them they're invaluable for finding problems now as you can see he's not having any problems now he bought the sink for 725 yes that's a reasonable amount of money but the information that things gives out on all kinds of vehicles you can use this thing for years and years and years show your friends if you're a mechanic they're definitely worth the money for a mechanic but even if you aren't if you want to keep your vehicles forever like he does something like this is going to save you so much hassle understand that today if you go to a dealership the average repair is pretty close to a thousand bucks for one repair if you can fix your car many times with this you're gonna save yourself a fortune so here we go further down the line it gives you the intermediate shift speed on your transmission shows you the mass airflow data the oxygen sensor switching now you can see lean rich lean rich that's what they're supposed to do most people don't understand how it actually works i'll explain that here too your car will be continuously going between rich and lean because it has a catalytic converter if it went rich all the time it would flood it out with fuel and ruin the thing and if it weren't lean it would get too hot it would burn itself out the way they work is they have to go rich and lean to burn the hydrocarbons inside it catalytic converter only works with it going ritually they can't stay one way or the other and when you see it graphically like this you can easily see the thing is working it's going rich lean rich lean if it's stuck one or the other not only you see one side stuck but you see which bank it is and we're in a transmission stop here chip speed these all done any faults but if you had a problem what's wrong with my transmission i have no idea well you're gonna get a lot of information on this if it's got a failure of the overdrive one-way clutch system you might find that the one-way clutch is broken on overdrive and you don't have overdrive anymore it's very expensive taking one of these off and rebuilding it let's say you saw you had a failure there well you know it's just the one-way clutch for the overdrive the rest of the transmission will work fine so you could just not use overdrive you could physically turn it off by pushing the button a lot of transmission information pressure solenoids a lot of times when they don't shift and they get old particular solenoids will go bad this will show you if it's good or bad they're good now but if they're bad not only can they show you your bed but you can actually test them using this machine someone had a problem with the pcv valves freezing in the winter well this shows you is the heater working and what control state it's in so if there is a problem it'll tell you it shows you the elapsed shift time see if it's not shifting right you can lock all this data and you can graph it too even tell you if the torque converter is slipping back in the day we mechanics would guess well we think your torque converter's slipping but we're gonna have to pull the transmission off the jacket well instead of pulling off the transmission you can check here to see if it's slipping this one isn't it's working fine but it has all that information perhaps your transmission fluid is overheating it shows you the temperature maybe you got a clog cooler maybe you're low on fluid well you're going to be able to see this right here maybe you don't know what the temperature is supposed to be well here's the over temperature it transmission there's no falls here so even if you presently don't know what an overheating temperature is it's going to tell you the in shaft you might not know if there's a problem this shows that all that information the same thing with variable cam timing it'll show you what's happening whether there's a fault or not as the age a lot of these variable valve timing systems start to have problems figuring it out before was a royal pain in the butt now you just look at the data and you can see the cam on the number one side's the one that's got the problems you'll know where to look you won't just start just not running right i wonder why this is going to give you all the information you need it even tells you your air conditioning clutch and if it's getting a cut off fault with wide open throttle with the air conditioning on and of course that's the raw data there's a heck of a lot more in these things check it out let's look at actuation tests vapormanger the evap the fuel pump the shift the desired pressure control your transmission the output test to the transmission how your one touch starting system is working well at least we don't have to worry about on this because he's smart he got the option with a key he doesn't have a keyless ignition you can see if the starter motor isn't working right the spark advantage you can actuate these things you can turn them on you can turn them off but it's not just that you can reset the pcm you can also remove the transmission adapter tables removing tables what the heck does that mean okay as you drive your vehicle the computers adapt to how you drive and how things wear and if something gets a little bit off you can erase it all with this machine and then you start over with the factory setting you had a bad solenoid or you just think something weird happened maybe you got stuck in the snow and you overspun the transmission that acted crazy you can reset all the info so it'll go from scratch i've had some of them over here that the only thing i did was reset them and the customer said wow just like a dream now and i say well we reset it you see what happens if it stays this way for a few months then it actually fixed it but when you do repairs you got to reset them anyways and these machines can do it say you're happy with how it shifts you can halt the transmission adaptive learning so if you're happy the way it is you know truthfully i do this with a lot of my computers and phones i disable updates because i found that some of these updates they screw everything up when my google pixel was updated lately did it screw up i wasn't able to access the phone without turning it all on and by then i missed the call i was doing live broadcasts and it would shut off all that was because of an upgrade so from now on i just say no everything has to be updated manually and then i read about it and then if there's an update and then three months later people don't say this update stinks then i'll update it that they let you do this with the car too so allows you to do a power balance let's say you change fuel injectors you got to do that on a modern car because no fuel injector is going to be made especially remanufactured one when they're actually perfect so the computer's got to balance them all and as you can see here you could do it on all eight cylinders now i haven't done it yet and you can see there's a little bit off here and there is adjust them but not much percentage-wise but if you're a fanatic that wants your vehicle to run as perfect as possible anytime you feel like it you could do a power rebalance you get a little bit carried away then don't get too carried away they're machines they're not perfect nothing's ever going to be perfect this thing runs so good i'd leave it alone but you got to change the fuel injector you're going to have to do a power balance and of course you can get any of the data in graphic form and if you want you can push data recording you can record it all and you can compare four different sensors at a time in graphic form you want to go that far that's actually the best way to analyze a lot of stuff because you can say when does it act up you could put it on certain speeds have it watch the speed say if it wasn't shifting right you could have the shift controls and then you could watch it and then when it acted up and you're having to record it when you play it back you can see that well as it gets to this speed that's when the gears drop off and looking at it in graphic form believe me you can get a lot of information that way that otherwise you might miss i mean these things are phenomenal if you want to go this far a tool like this for 700 bucks is actually peanut money things that didn't do one tenth of this a decade ago were five ten thousand dollars the information goes up and the price goes down if you're willing to spend this kind of money and you want to learn how to use one of these things maybe you'll end up fixing yours and your neighbors cars or get a new career who knows but they're really handy things now you can see the owner is an old-timer like me although i don't like mac stuff it's an ipod but he's got an ipod manually plugged in and he listens to led zeppelin the whole way here so he may have some old tastes but he's not adverse to new technology he was wondering gee should i keep this thing should i send it back now he's going to keep it because he's seen that there's an awful lot you can do with one of these things even if you don't know that much now you just learned a whole bunch in this video hopefully if you were paying attention there's a lot of stuff you can do with a little bit of knowledge and you can keep adding to your knowledge maybe you're never going to touch an automatic transmission maybe you're going to try to fix it well at least you got the choice here and even if you're not going to fix it yourself you can go in and say you know my servo number two has got a problem that's hanging up then they can't bs you with something and they'll say well do you want us to try the servo and you can say yeah try the servo i don't want to rebuild the whole thing if it's just a circle oh they're very handy you want to join the electronic age it's a good way of doing it so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos remember to ring that bell you\n"