by Gary Hixson

A 2005 MINI Cooper 1.6L S pulls into your shop with the check engine light on. Upon reading the code, you find a P1688 – Electronic throttle control monitor level versus mass airflow calculation. The code set condition is because the flow of air going through the Mass Airflow Sensor (MAF) is different from the flow of air going into the throttle body.

Where to start with the diagnosis? Well, common sense and experience might lead you to diagnose the MAF, suspecting a faulty sensor. But let’s take a quick look at the SureTrack data in ProDemand. If you look at the Common Replaced Parts Graph, you can see that real experience in the aftermarket shows that the harmonic balancer is much more likely to be the main culprit. SureTrack is the voice of the aftermarket!

In addition to Common Replaced Parts, ProDemand offers the Real Fixes – industry insights based on actual repair orders and experiences from expert technicians. After reading the associated Real Fix, you find:

What is the lesson? Not all real-world information is created equal. ProDemand offers exclusive Real Fix information using a dataset of real aftermarket repair orders to save time by pointing you in the correct diagnostic direction.

380 Million Repair Orders

Mitchell 1 uses our library of 380 million repair orders (ROs) as the foundation data set of Real Fixes. If you think about it, there is no better source of information than a repair order because on each repair order you have the code/symptom that brought the vehicle to the shop, along with the corresponding component on that specific vehicle that was fixed by a professional technician.

As an example, let’s look at the 2004 Chevy Impala. We have processed over 337,000 repair orders for that specific vehicle alone! And looking at our Top 10 Repairs feature (figure below), you can see that P0300, engine misfire, has happened 802 times for this vehicle. When you combine the code with the probable component list, you are well on your way to quickly diagnosing the source of the fault.

No other product offers this amount of information to pull from, giving you confidence in the data to correctly diagnose the vehicle.

18 Million Real Fixes

Our database of real-world information keeps growing. Mitchell 1 sorts through the database of repair orders daily to identify valuable Real Fixes to add to ProDemand. Currently we are adding over 65,000  Real Fixes to ProDemand every day. This pace is much faster than other products and gives ProDemand users a definite advantage that other information providers can’t match. Take a look at the chart below showing the total aftermarket Real Fixes. ProDemand has a commanding lead of real-world information that will increase over time.

Real-world information will continue to become more important as a source of repair information in aftermarket shops. ProDemand offers the largest dataset of accurate, RO-based information available to your shop. As the example of the harmonic balancer on the MINI Cooper shows, having the right real-world information can make all the difference in quickly and accurately diagnosing the code or symptom and then completing the repair on schedule.