While we wait for them to finally figure out how to write that document (yes it hasn't happened yet) Why don't we take a look at what has been happening to the Corolla. After all we're just days away from me having owned the thing for a year, how crazy is that?
So...there were a couple of upgrades that needed to be done over the last 830 miles or so as of last fillup (we don't drive a lot anymore). I've spoken about the trunk light before. Now that we got most of the shipments from the US, I took the liberty to get some nice white LEDs for interior lights and some more standard warmer-colored bulbs for the plate lights, if all goes well it means that we do not need to worry about that for a while. The new lights can be (somewhat) seen on the images below.
They are great. much brighter than the old ones, to the point where you can see them gradually switch on to illuminate the cockpit even through the very dark limo tint that the car's fitted with.
Next on the upgrade list are the fogflights, I was going to go for some nice Morimoto units but being how I rarely use them I couldn't justify the expense, fortunately, a facebook marketplace deal netted us some OEM Foglamps for the princely sum of $10. Some cheap trim bits from Amazon (this is fine, the trim doesn't actually hold the fog lights in any way, they literally just have the hole so the lights may shine through) and we were in business Fortunately, the people who rebuilt this thing had some sense and merely tuckered in the connections in the fenders instead of just cutting them. The image above shows them already on
And some closeups of the foglights:
The steering wheel controls didn't work. We traced that to a cheap replacement clockspring that didn't have the connections we needed to plug them appropriately. When the airbag deploys, the rapid expansion of gases generally destroys the clockspring. A US spec donor gave us the clockspring as well as many and varied bits from the steering column, in case any of those had also been destroyed. In the end, we only did needed the clockspring. The buttons are also illuminated now, which is nice
Then, we also acquired a ScanGauge. This seems like a good idea since this is my first car with OBD2, and it will also allow me to check my tire pressures in addition to some other useful things. This is how it looks right now.
It hasn't been a completely faultless experience. owning to some weird issues regarding its unwillingness to shut down properly or to do a hard reboot which would leave me with an illuminated but otherwise blank ScanGauge. It also kinda blocks the info screens of the dash when in my driving position. Not much can be done about the latter, The best theory that we can come up with for the former is that the central locking would trigger a CANBUS event (interior lights, preheating of O2 sensor, some other nonsense to make it go to closed loop mode ASAP), and that would trigger the ScanGauge to start and stay on even if told to stay off when it detects 0 RPM (OBD2 doesn't have Engine On/Off states so a ScanGauge guesses at it, for lack of a better word). As evidenced when I deliberately triggered it by fiddling about with the remote. Fortunately, the latest software revisions from Linear Logic has a new setting which switches it off depending on voltage. It was put in after some SkyActiv Mazda engines exhibited similar behaviors. What it does for my particular vehicle is switch off the ScanGauge when the battery registers a voltage under 13 volts. 12.7 being the standard voltage for a battery with the engine off. So even if it switches on due to the central locking/something else I don't know, it will detect the battery is not charging and promptly switch off (promptly being about 10-15 seconds). It also seems to have solved the crash issue.
It didn't solve the fact that one of my TPMS sensors seems to be a bit...off...
Otherwise, It has a car cover, and it has needed nothing else. Which is good, as it is expected to not need anything else. I'm happy with it.