I often use this site for service info. It’s all pirated from ALLDATA. Currently a comprehensive subscription to service info is around $180/mo. A modern repair shop can’t function without service information.
Most Manufacturers have a website that you can access and pay for a day or more access. Usually it's the exact same one they use at the dealerships. I was able to print the manuals to pdfs.
Seems to be US specific. Can't see manuals for the last 3 cars I've had: 2001 BMW 330d, 2010 BMW 330i, 2011 Ford C-Max petrol. Renault stops in 1987, Peugeot stops in 1993, and there's nothing for Citroen, Vauxhall or Rover/MG at all.
(Realoem is pretty comprehensive for BMW parts numbers, if you need them)
That said, a lot of newer official service manuals don't really go into detail and just give instructions on how to disassemble and swap parts; better than no manual, but a huge contrast from older ones that would also include detailed theory of operation and troubleshooting information.
Arguably, many of the things you’ll need to work on for newer vehicles are likely far outside the casual mechanic’s expertise and require a lot of bespoke and expensive equipment to service.
Everything else, like oil, brakes or fluid changes are basically the same as any other car. I understand that this kind of runs afoul of the spirit of this post, but there’s a reason many engines are simply replaced when they encounter some kind of major malfunction.
I am an amateur mechanic, but have done a great deal of very technical work. My only formal training is three years of high school shop classes, everything else I learned under or in a car. The newest thing I have worked on is a 2022 GMC Sierra. Seemed to be pretty much the same as my 2003 Chevy Silverado.
You are definitely correct about foreign (non-USA) makes. My wife had an Audi when we got married. I own a small toolbox of tools specific to her Audi S4 that I will never use again, but that was a 2006, so this issue predates 2013 for the makes that it is true about.
Admittedly, I try to avoid fuel injected vehicles. So I don't go out of my way to work on new things.
You’re right, I was speaking specifically to euro and Japanese makes (I’m biased toward those makes, so I didn’t even think of qualifying it).
I do a lot of auto work, between restoring cars to repairing my own. But modern fuel injection systems run on a razor’s edge of tolerances and often getting to some part requires dismounting a turbo, which is all sorts of pain in the ass, and not something I’d recommend for an amateur.
You say that but the new stuff is actually way more tolerant. Once we got electronic fuel, timing and spark in one ECU things totally changed. You want finicky? Deal with a solex carb!
Ah dude those bosch CIS systems are hot potato garbage. I mean its a cool concept its just so fiddly. Once we got LH though things got a lot better. But that brings me back memories
they're neat and they're fine-ish usually once running but they're a fricking pain to setup especially since a lot of the OEM you are supposed to have don't exist anymore. Like the book says 'oh plugin this or that' and its just... yeah no sorry
The only cool thing is the wiring harnesses and everything are fully analog so like, you have fuel injection mechanically, i mean that in itself is cool. it's just a pain
I wonder how similar it is to a mechanical fuel injected diesel. All my tractors are diesels and they have electric free fuel injection.
My tractors are something I always marvel over, besides the starter you don't need any power. I have an old Cat diesel that doesn't even have an electric starter! Uses a small gas engine (called a pony engine) to start the large diesel engine, and the gas engine uses a pull start, very similar to a lawn mower engine.
Diesels never were carb'd - there's no venturi effect possible without vacuum. There's no spark. It's just totally different.
They always have direct injection into the cylinder as far as I know. Maybe in the early 1900's they did manifold injection but I don't think so.
It's just a total different concept.
How the metering is done (IE How much fuel to meet load) though may have been similar, I am not sure. I 'asked a friend' on this one, since I am really unfamiliar with diesels in general.
Ya you're probably right. I think "common rail" injection is based on gas DI though.
And there are some engines that are indirect injection (called IDI). I've been on the hunt for a 90s 7.3l IDI. They're gutless without a turbo, but slap a pair of turbos on and it makes a heck of a towing machine. But I don't know as much about diesels, partly because they just never break the way a gas engine will. I've rebuilt a few gas engines, diesels just seem to be made of tougher stuff.
Ya if imports are your thing you're definitely going to have a few tool chests of one-off tools!
I have always stuck to American muscle and diesel tractors. The amazing simplicity of those machines has always attracted me. I love that I can hold a complete understand of the entire
vehicle in my head. I'm sure you can even for modern vehicles, but they're not simple at all!
There will never unfortunately be an open-source car. The nearest you will get is by getting a well-documented one with good OEM parts availability and converting it to an EV which eliminates a lot of the proprietary computers that seem to cause issues. EV drivetrain and battery parts are mostly well documented and interchangeable and can even be open-source, and Air bag and ABS computers in older cars also mostly work stand-alone (ie they will work properly if the cars computer is not there)
Newer cars have much better safety systems but have unfortunately gone all in for making things difficult.
Well, at least here in Brazil, vehicle's manuals were far way better, even explaining the process of building the car. This reminds me of the history of a guy that rebuilded a Volkswagen Saveiro just reading the manual: https://youtu.be/ZKe1gl4WCvc?si=nIvKtAESdmn03bCn (Brazilian Portuguese, with auto generated subtitles)
It depends what you mean by "open-source". You can build the entire drivetrain of the equivalent of a stereotypical mid-century domestic car with no parts from the original manufacturer, for example.
> there’s a reason many engines are simply replaced when they encounter some kind of major malfunction.
Only a catastrophic failure[1] results in an engine replacement. For the p99 of car owners out there (especially in rust-prone areas), the engine will outlast the body by a large margin.
[1] And for some types of catastrophic failure, such as overheating damage, it's still cheaper to replace the head only.
This isn't true for many makes and models. It's different than older models because troubleshooting or servicing starts with interrogating or commanding the car with specific software that isn't basic OBDII but with OBD adapters and cheap software both my 2010's Volkswagen and Jeeps can be diagnosed and serviced with an OBD reader.
Ironically my old Toyota is one of the hardest to really get at sensor and dealer-software changes.
In personal experience, VW manuals are atrocious to figure out while Toyota, at least around 2000 put out wonderful service manuals even if the ECU's are locked down.
Ironically my old Toyota is one of the hardest to really get at sensor and dealer-software changes.
In personal experience, VW manuals are atrocious to figure out while Toyota, at least around 2000 put out wonderful service manuals even if the ECU's are locked down.
It seems like one effect of this is that the temperature display can not be localized. Most everything else on a US market Toyota can be converted to metric but it looks like the AC and internal dash display for temperature can't be changed by the dealer, by knowledgeable users or by repair shops.
Thank you so much for this! I'm constantly needing to Google for torque specs when I work on my van, and as great as the Odyssey forum is it's really nice to have this. I really appreciate it, personally. I do all my own work, and it would be nice if manufacturers made this information more easy to access for those of us who do.
Torque specs you generally do get a feel for. It's basically related to bolt size. I mean, generally. Use torque specs inside the engine. Outside the engine go by feel
Well, there's confounding factors: the type of bolt (such as stretch bolts), the material the bolt is going into (heads are aluminium, while some sleeves in aluminium parts are not), whether the bolt is lubricated before insertion (spark plugs really should be lubricated), etc.
I love old original FSMs (factory service manuals) and tend to buy them for a car I’m beginning to restore. I’ll reach out to these folks to see if they’d be interested in scans of them or whatever they use to build this site.
I’ve always been curious about how many different manuals there seem to be for every car. I know that the manufacturers create one for dealers and that there are/were companies that tear cars down to make their own, but it feels like when I’ve needed to go find instructions for things there’s a staggering variety of manuals of varying levels of helpfulness.
Even when I manage to find what I think is an FSM it seems a little hard to follow what’s really going on in a given section without reading the section for every other assembly involved.
You’re totally right about this. I’d say there’s a very wide range of quality between various manufacturers’ FSMs. Toyota ones are great with diagnostic instructions and explicit parameters to match, whereas other brands I’ve leafed through have completely muddy pictures and poor instructions or no figures.
For third parties, I find Bentley manuals to be extremely good and thorough.
The car that I'm most interested in fixing something on at the moment is a Toyota, so that's great to hear about their manuals. If one finds a manual from the manufacturer itself is it safe to say that that's the true FSM versus something else they may have produced?
The piece I like about this is less the manual about how to do the things—although that's always helpful—but the information about parts and labor. I assume the cost of things is out of date, but it's nice to have some baseline for labor time. Most folks (with ICE vehicles anyway) aren't doing most maintenance or repairs, so reducing the information asymmetry with various repair shops is a welcome tool.
I looked up a particular car model I know and they've just made (really terrible) copies of the manuals published by Robert Bentley. The font and diagrams are exactly as I remember.
This is basically wholesale copyright infringement.
For another vehicle I know well, there's basically no actual repair information - just diagrams telling you where to find a particular component in the car. Nothing about how to actually do diagnostics or repairs.
...because they gatekeep everyone via parts, instead.
Tesla is one of very, very few companies for which its parts aren't available via the OEMs; parts made for Teslas can only be had via Tesla. If some part in your VW goes bad or breaks or wears, you often have up to three options: from VW via dealers, via the OEM that made the part for VW, via parts distributors - or via non-OEMs that have made a compatible part. VW (and others) often source from multiple OEMs or switch OEMs, so you sometimes have multiple OEM supplier options.
With Tesla? Only via them. For every fucking part on the car save stuff like brake pads and rotors.
You have to give them a VIN number to buy a part, and if the VIN belongs to a car Tesla has decided isn't roadworthy anymore, they won't go any further.
Want to put a small block chevy V8 into your Yugo? The guy at the GM dealer part counter will happily sell you one as long as you've got the money. Discovered that a Ford temperature sensor is a more reliable replacement for the one in your Jeep? The parts counter staff won't even blink when they sell you one.
The only time you'll get asked for a VIN is if the part you're asking for has varied with production, and certain VIN ranges might require a specific part for compatibility.
This is the most exciting thing about the GM EVs to me. They will be wide open and modular. In the EV swap world the Leaf motor is more economical than a Tesla just because it’s separate from the gearbox.
As a professional diesel mechanic by trade, i can say this is a similar practice shops pay through-the-nose for with paid online catalogue services. this makes shadetree work on Teslas a treat. I spent a summer during covid doing work on Model S suspensions in a spare bay.
Im also chuffed to see the "pictures" in the service catalogue are just as pathetic as the ones some manufacturers include in the paid service portals. Freightliner and Mac manuals are all pristine...theres clearly an artist on salary who gets paid very very well for his craft. Companies that rhyme with Bilbo however include photos that look like they were taken with a gameboy color camera on a stormy night.
It's curious how this kind of documents and book are easy to find for free for cars sold in North American but not from other places. That's a big marker about how big is the car culture there.
Haynes has a classic print error on the distributor leads for my car. Its like 4 1 3 2 instead of 2 3 1 4 (its right they just got the orientation backwards) which leads to many a forum thread.
The answer to car manuals is like reading history. Make sure you get two different source materials. Haynes did their own tear downs and write ups. Pair that with the OEM manuals, and service bulletins, forums and you get a good picture. The reference book for saab 900 is the Bentley Bible. Its a fantastic resource but the Haynes has a transmisson teardown and rebuild and better info on older trims. Pair that with the service manuals from Saab and the forums and you're rocking
IIRC the Suzuki Sidekick manual has a bunch of inaccurate torque specifications, on the very high side. I was lucky to learn about that before I did any work.
Possibly a metric-imperial units mixup? Values originally in Nm mistaken as ft-lbs would mean they're around 1.356x what they should be --- which is dangerous because they're not absurdly out of range.
Many public libraries also offer access to a car repair manual database through their online collection. You need a library card, but the information is high quality.
They have/had huge collections of physical manuals too. That brings back memories around the turn of the century when I was in the "bookz" scene, going to the libraries with others and maxing out our library cards to bring home dozens of them for "scanparties". There were huge torrents of car manuals created as a result, and I suspect at least some of our efforts have been preserved in the "pirate libraries" today.
Just compared to a manual I purchased for $40 from Haynes - CHARM is just as good if not slightly better than that commercial repair guide for a 2008 VW GTI.
I've occasionally wondered if there are any production cars that have original manufacturing/design documents released. Feels like those could be really cool to see for some classic cars (911 comes to mind...)
> We have the parts drawings in our collection, and we can supply copies, but we cannot confer the right to manufacture reproduction parts for sale – you would need to contact the Ford Motor Company for that
Curious what legal mechanism they are trying to use here, and on how solid legal ground they are... somehow I imagine it could make interesting legal case if they sued someone making new parts.
(IANAL) Patents have long expired. Copyright may or may not apply. Trademark is probably the only thing that they have a solid legal standing on. Judging by the wide availability of aftermarket parts, even for vehicles much newer, I suspect that quote is more of a disclaimer than anything else.
Labor times are for new cars at flat rate dealerships, a lot of them are not realistic. Dealers make a pile of money off brake jobs, shocks, and other "gravy" repairs where it takes less time than the book says. They also lose time on the hard stuff that nobody in the place does on a routine basis like wire harness repairs. The timing also expects the mechanic to have the right tools all at hand, the right parts all ready to go, and the car is expected to be new, clean, and rust free. Your mileage may vary.
>Our data will be available free of charge, permanently.
Permanently free and available just means until the website fails to pay the hosting bills or gets taken down by lawyers. Akin to a lifetime warranty. The company will surely fail before you do.
