Undercarriage Protective Cover

[fluidculture]

We had a really bad snow storm here and this made a chunk of my plastic undercarriage cover break off. should I be concerned? I'm only asking because it was put there for a reason. It was a piece under the driver side.

[kwimberly]

Part of the belly pan? It keeps debris out of the engine bay, and it has also been shown to keep engine temps down vs. when it's not on.

[fluidculture]

it looks like the section under the engine is okay. maybe a tad bit towards the back of the engine. but the main chunk is under the driver seat.

[kwimberly]

This thing, right? How much is gone? How many of the dowel pins (screws) are missing?

It's not going to kill your car to run without it. It's good to have it on there, and it does help with temps, but I've been running without my belly pan for several weeks since I've been working on the car a lot.



http://www.ecstuning.com/stage/edpd/...bcategory=Body

[fluidculture]

the belly pan looks okay. just a section under the drivers seat.

[ziggituning]

there are 3 sections on each side of the car. the first one is behind the 2 front wheels, and it has a large round insertt plug, it is clipped to the main plastic cover with 3 push pins, and held by one nut and one screw that also hold the fender liner. Then you have the main one which I doubt you would have dammaged, held on by countless plastic nuts, and to finish off there is a 3rd plastic located at the rear right in front of the rear wheel held on by 2 torks screws and 1 push pin and one plastic nut. I think you may have ripped off the first piece, this can be purchased seperately, and there are some hard lines that it covers so I would say fix or replace it before the next storm. Hope it helps.

[okhan]

The same thing happened to me during our first winter storm last month. The roads hadn't been plowed yet and I could hear this awful scraping sound while I was driving. When I looked under the driver's side of the car I saw that so much slushy snow had built-up inside the plastic sheath that it had been pushed it down and was touching the ground. I was basically plowing the road as I drove. There was no way I could clean it out and fix it during a snow storm, so I just ripped off the section of sheathing under the driver's seat. I'll look at replacing it next spring.