Many of us older guys, like myself and my brother, would perform all the maintenance and repair of our vehicles. As time went on and modern day vehicles became so complex, containing hundreds of microcontrollers and sensors, many of us wouldn't even attempt a diagnosis or repair.
Yesterday on a trip back home my vehicle felt like it was running rough or that a tire was out of balance. The next time I had to accelerate from a stop I realized that the engine had lost some power. Then I noticed lights coming on the dash. The check engine light was flashing. A message indicating the Forward Collision Warning (FCW) system failure appeared. And other symbol lights came on indicating a problem with the Lane Departure Warning (LDW) and Traction Control systems. I live in a rural area and there aren't any roads that you can go slow on but I was able to get home in about 30 minutes.
About 5 minutes before this all started I had my vehicle washed and was thinking that something may have gotten wet that wasn't supposed to thus causing the issue. I waited until this morning and started the vehicle hoping that whatever may have dried out and the problem would be fixed. No such luck. Looking at a couple of forums for my vehicle I discovered that these particular failure indications were not unusual. But there were several different repairs made that did fix the problem even though they were not, by common sense thinking, related to the visual error indications.
I discovered that my brother has one of the diagnostic code readers that plugs into a vehicle's OBD2 connector. But when he came over with it I realized that the reader which he purchased back in 1997 was not able diagnose any newer car like my 2015 model. So off to a local auto parts store where I bought a middle of the road, in price, code reader for $100. Plugging it into my vehicle and pairing it with my phone which I had downloaded an app that has access to the thousands of different vehicles and codes I was presented with a result indicating that the spark plug coil for the number two cylinder was bad. A trip back to the store to buy the $50 replacement part ended with my engine happily purring again. BTW, this was not one the fixes on any of the forums for this issue.
I consider myself lucky in taking the chance to buy this code reader and then the repair part as I'm sure the repair performed by a dealer would have been much more than the $150 I spent. So, sometimes, it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks.