mikemo

The guys are being pretty rough on you. When you don't know a lot about cars you are at the mercy of the shop. That's why it's good to find an honest mechanic (and difficult). The good thing is your car is back in business.

I would suggest that the next time you need repairs that you ask for the return of the old parts that they replace. That lets them know that you are paying attention to the work that they are doing. Also, as mentioned, those extra services like "fuel injection cleaning" are often up-sells to extract more money from you. If you have a clogged injector, and the procedure is done correctly, it can be helpful. It's just hard to know when it's necessary. You could ask them to show you why they think it is necessary. It's ok to ask questions.

Have fun
Mike M.

BLAQ&GREYs2k

A bad cam sensor will DEFINITELY do it. I feel like if you would have pulled the codes you could have seen one for camshaft position. Replaced it, bam. But its fixed nonetheless.

Fuel treatment service? ONLY products I would recommend as a tech is the BG products like 44K, and my all time favorite ONLY IF YOU HAVE A TEST PIPE, Seafoam. Many people come in for a P0420 code after seafoam which means you toasted your catalytic converter. I think the perfect combo is the gas mix seafoam, and the aeresol spray with the U-shaped straw used in the throttle body.

I ran the aerosol spray seafoam on my S and after, I looked inside my intake manifold with a flash light and it was spotless! Covered in black oil, soot, gunk before.

AP1Driver

I guess the OP didn't read my previous post. Hate to be the one that "told you so" OP... I hate most shops, they are the most dishonest people in the world 99.9% of time, which is exactly why I do 99.9% of my own work... Glad your car's fixed though..

B0neSt0ck

Did they give you back the old sensor?? They are supposed to if they said they changed it....

xviper

Well, they're supposed to IF they were honest. Considering that the cost for one TDC sensor is about $62.00 (less when a shop buys them) and it takes less than 1/2 hour labor to change one, that leaves about $300.00 for diagnosis. Let's take out an hour for that at $100.00. Well, you do the math. I surmise that the shop didn't have any idea where to start looking and messed around with all kinds of things before they decided to change something and wiggled and tweaked a bunch of other things and miraculously, it started to work. It was probably so simple that they just had to make it something more significant and charge an "appropriate" amount of money for their tedious work they put into it. If, in fact, one of the TDC sensors was bad, a quick scan for codes would have homed in on the problem in 2 minutes. Oh well, sometimes we have to deal with what comes when we must rely on "professionals" to solve our problems. In many ways, 500 bucks is not a lot to pay to bring a dead car back to life.
BTW, the S2000 has TWO TDC sensors. They are both identical. One is located on top, at the rear of the valve cover and the other one is on the side, at the rear of the valve cover. There are many examples posted on this forum that indicate the engine WILL run with one bad one. It may or may not start, depending on how well maintained the engine is and when it does run, it runs poorly, but it will run.

Mr. Francesco

Before this was fixed, would your fuel pump prime with the key in the ignition?

Mr. Francesco

Can you further elaborate? Are you referring to the PGM-FI relay?