Hey everyone, first and foremost, nice to meet all of you. I just signed up for this forum tonight because my dad is having a problem with his 2001 xl7. I am a vw owner myself but do have lots of suzuki love.  i used to drive an 97 sidekick sport and after that just a reguluar sidekick.  Awesome suv's they never let me sit and went awesome in the snow.

So about my dads car.  It has a little over 80,000. A few days ago my dad called me and said his xl got a CEL. I told him to take off the battery, reset it, and if the code comes back something is wrong for sure. So he did that, and sure enough the CEL came back. But, when it came back on this time, he was driving and he said the car seemed to lose power and was very sluggish. So he parked it in the garage and today he said he went out to start it up and it turns over but wont start. Cranks over fine he says. I am going to visit him tomorrow and would like some ideas to take a look at. I don't have a scanner to pull the code, so any other areas to look at would be awesome. I want to just get it to run so I can get it up to Autozone and see if we can pull the CEL code and go from there.  I look forward to learning a lot from all of you.

-Craig G.

Hey everyone, first and foremost, nice to meet all of you. I just signed up for this forum tonight because my dad is having a problem with his 2001 xl7. I am a vw owner myself but do have lots of suzuki love.  i used to drive an 97 sidekick sport and after that just a reguluar sidekick.  Awesome suv's they never let me sit and went awesome in the snow.

So about my dads car.  It has a little over 80,000. A few days ago my dad called me and said his xl got a CEL. I told him to take off the battery, reset it, and if the code comes back something is wrong for sure. So he did that, and sure enough the CEL came back. But, when it came back on this time, he was driving and he said the car seemed to lose power and was very sluggish. So he parked it in the garage and today he said he went out to start it up and it turns over but wont start. Cranks over fine he says. I am going to visit him tomorrow and would like some ideas to take a look at. I don't have a scanner to pull the code, so any other areas to look at would be awesome. I want to just get it to run so I can get it up to Autozone and see if we can pull the CEL code and go from there.  I look forward to learning a lot from all of you.

-Craig

Check spark and fuel, After that there really isn't much you can do without pulling the code. Perhaps the best thing would be to stop on the way to your dads and buy a scanner. If you work on your own cars you will need it in the future.

If it all started soon after a fill up, it might be related to water in the gas.  You might try dumping some Heet into the tank.  Otherwise, yeah, you're going to need to know what that code is.

Well I didnt have the $ to get the code reader, I have one for my vw but its special for my car only.  I checked all the fuses, they checked ok.  It's weird thought that when I try to start the car the mph guage goes all over the place up!  What would cause that??