How to Remove Ambient Air Temp Sensor 2010-17 Chevy Equinox

Hey friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, I'm working on a 2015 Chevy Equinox. We're going to be removing the ambient air temp sensor. It'd be a very easy job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to try to get this little plastic plate off of here. There's some push clips. I'm going to go ahead and remove these. The center of these pulls up from the outer part of it. I'll show you what it looks like here. That's what they look like. So, when you have the center pushed in, it forces those two sides out, which holds it in the hole, okay? So that's why you lift up the center part. It relieves pressure, and this thing can squish. It slides right out of the hole, okay?

We're going to do the same thing for all of these. Just a little spot you can try and get your tool into. I'm using my little forky tool. You can use whatever you got. Pocket screwdriver usually works pretty well. Let's set these aside. Sometimes, they come apart. That's okay. We'll just shove it back together. Easy peasy. Okay, so we've got those four out. Let's see if I can grab this plastic and wiggle around. See what's holding it in.

Now that we got this side off, we're going to do the same to the other side of the vehicle, and then we'll go ahead, and we'll start removing the rest of the bumper cover. There we go. That one out of the way. So now, we're going to remove these. These are Torx bits little T20s, like little stars. This is what the tool looks like. Put it in here. Turn it to the left. Zip them all out. I'm going to leave one in. Just going to have it loose though. That's just going to make it so the bumper cover stays on while we continue down in the bottom there, and it'll hold it up for us.

See what those look like? They're all the same. You've got the one that's still there, of course. That's going to move around a little bit. Perfect. Let's move along. So, we're going to do some push clips here. We've got a push clip right there, okay? There's going to be another one right in front of this tire right there, here and here. After we remove those, there's a T20, and a T20 there. Same tool that we used up top, we're going to use down bottom, okay?

I got my little forky tool. I've got a little pocket screwdriver. You just got to see about trying to pull out the centers of these push clips. I showed you how they worked already. Show you again just in case. When it was closed, it was like that, and just go in between, pull out the center, and then it unlocks the little edges there. So, here we go. We got that one, and move down the line. Grab this guy. This one's going to be a little harder to get to because the tire, but I'm sure it can be done.

Okay, got Our push clips. Set it aside. Got our T20 here, here. They both look the same. Easy peasy. Can't mix them up. That feels pretty great. Take a peek under here. We've got that bolt right there. I'm going to grab the size for that real quick. I'll let you know what it is. Once we get that out, we're going to do the same exact thing to the other side of the vehicle, and then we'll lift it up more, and we'll grab everything from underneath.

All right, so we've got our seven millimeter. Going to blast this out of here. There it is. Set that aside. Okay, let me give that a little tug. Perfect. So, now, like I said, we're going to go do the same exact thing on the other side of the vehicle. We'll raise it up. We'll continue on releasing the rest of this bumper cover, disconnect the fog lights of course, and then we should be clear to bring it back down and pop it all right off.

So under here, we've got our fog light assemblies. You can see from the backside, we've got some wiring that goes to the bulb. We're just going to turn the bulb to the left counterclockwise till it stops, and then we're going to carefully pull it out. See. We'll give it a quick inspection. We've got our rubber seal there. Slide it back over. Easy enough. Should be easy enough. Got the flashlight in my hand. There it is, cool.

All right, so something to note. You want to be very careful not to touch on that glass, especially if you've got oily hands or anything like that. Even gloves isn't really the best to touch the glass, so if you can avoid it, that's always great. Take a look to see if it looks like it's black in any way or just colored or swollen. The film inside, it looks like it's got any crusty buildups on it. If that was the case, you'd want to replace it.

Right on the back of the bulb, you can see what the bulb number is. It's an H11 on this particular vehicle, so I'm sure it is on yours as well if you're working on the same thing. I'm just going to leave this down to dangle um... funny word. But anyway, we're going to leave it so it can hang like that, and I'm going to do the same to the other side, and then we'll just go ahead, and we'll remove a couple more bolts here. Get the lower part of this thing moving, and then we'll go ahead back up top.

We'll take off the last bolt, and we should be able to slide this right off. So, here we go. This part right here is part of the inner wheel well. That, we're taking apart up there, so we want to remove these two bolts. We're going to continue with our seven millimeter. Turning these to the left, obviously, and right along. This little electric tool is amazing. Slides out. It's clear to come off. Just got a little triangle here, okay?

When you pull it off, you can see that just means when you're putting it back together, that triangle is going to go back under there, okay? Just hold it, and you can put your bolts back in. Easy peasy, okay? Cool, so this is wobbling around pretty easily now. I would say we're clear to bring it back down, and we'll start pulling it off. Here we go. It's time for our last bolt up top here. Going to hold our bumper cover.

Make sure it doesn't want to come loose too much on us till we can figure out exactly what's going on. Don't forget, we have our fog lamp bulbs just hanging under there, okay? So, the less that we juggle this around, probably the better overall. Let me see if I can get this off. There we are. Now, we've removed our front bumper cover, so here we are. We've got our ambient air temp sensor right here. You could probably get to it without possibly taking off the whole bumper cover. We're doing multiple videos on this vehicle, so we have it off. I'm just showing you where it is.

You can probably come in like this, do this. I don't know. It's your prerogative. This is just a visualization of showing you where it is. How to remove it. Check it out, replace it. Blah, blah, blah. So, I'm just going to use my little forky tool to pull it out of there. There it is. We'll check our wiring. I don't see any funny colors in there. No rainbow colors or rust or anything like that. It looks fine. So, perfect. We're clear to move on.

So here we go. We've got our ambient air temp sensor, goes right in the hole right here. Just push it right in. Take our little clip with the lock. We already checked it. There's no funny colors. Clips right in. There it is. Easy peasy. So here we go. We've got our bumper cover. We're going to lift it up on here. We're going to be careful of these edges to make sure that they don't go hitting up against the fender. I mean, this one's a little damaged, but that wasn't me by the way.

Just playin'. It really wasn't though. Anyway, I'm just going to keep those edges low, and I'm just going to scoop the top end up here. Just get it settled in. I'm going to start a couple of these bolts just to hold it for me, and then I'm going to work my way along the edges there. Get everything settled in along the top, and then I'll go down to the bottom and do the same thing. So, what size is this? 20. Torx bit 20.

We'll keep it loose just in case we have to move some stuff around, right? I just want to make sure that it can't fall down, hit the floor. Like I said, I'm keeping all these loose. I'm just starting them in, so I can move everything around as I need to, okay? Nice and loose. Okay, let's come along here. Right up along the headlamp, we had the little scoops, right? You come over here. You got a little clip, clip, clip, clip, clip, okay?

So that's where your bumper's going to want to ride in, so you're going to need to bring it up. Move it right up along your headlamp. The bumper cover itself has all these little slots in it, right? That's where those clips are going to want to ride. So you're probably going to need to give it a little tug just to get it into where it needs to go. Looking good. Let me do the same thing to the other side.

All right, so we've got the bumper all lined up. It looks great. Couldn't ask for better, really. I'm just going to take my Torx bit 20. Snug these puppies up. Very nice. All right. Now, let's lift it up to a working height, so we can get to those wheel wells. We'll get all those put together. Then we'll bring it all the way up. We'll plug in our fog lights and finish up along the bottom.

All right, so we remember that we had the one seven-millimeter head bolt, goes right up through here, right? Goes through the bottom of the bumper cover up into the fender. So, I'll just use my little tool. You can use a ratchet, whatever you got. I'm just going to find the hole here. There it is. Nice and snug. Okay, grab this. Slide it back into position here. Okay, so now when we look at it, you can see behind there, there's a metal piece. That's where there's a screw.

This one's just a big gaping hole. That's a plug, screw, hole, hole, hole. All right, so let's see what we got in parts. You got two screws. Perfect. I remember saying we needed two screws, and we got four little push clips. So, we didn't lose anything. We're doing all right. There we are. Let's do the push clips first because they'll keep everything generally speaking where it should be, right? Then we can worry about putting in all those screws after. Here we go.

So, two screws. I'm just going to grab my little Torx bit. I've got it right here. Sticking with my 20 and my wheel. Little nut. See if I can get this in. I'm going to grab a ratchet. I'll finish that one off in one second. Here we are. Okay, grab my ratchet. Feels great. Okay, all those are still in. Perfect. We'll do the same to the other wheel well, and then we'll bring it up and continue.

So, now, we're going to put in our fog lamps. Once again, we're going to be very careful not to touch that glass. We'll just check them one more time to make sure the film is not broken. We did a lot of moving around. I'm just going to take it, put it up in here. We'll just start by going all the way as far counterclockwise as I can, and then I'm going to turn it to the right, so it locks in. It should be straight up and down in the locking position.

Okay, so I'll come over and do the same thing over here. Check it. Looks pretty great. Filament's not broken. Nothing moving around. I didn't touch the glass. I'm going to bring it over. I'm going to turn it all the way counterclockwise as far as I can tell till it grabs. I'm going to bring it back to the right. Once it sets in, I'll bring it down. It's locked. It's in the straight up-and-down position. All ears are in. Cool.

So now we're going to grab this. We got our little triangle ear here. It's going to slide over that just like this, sets in. Redo the same thing to the other side. We've got two bolts. Okay, easy peasy. All right, so I've got my bolts. I'm just going to take them, and I'm just going to put them in. Here. This one. Very nice. Everything feels great. We'll bring it back down. We'll finish up with the top, and we should be all done.

Okay, so now it's time to put these up, up along the top, right? Got our little clips here, right? Like I said, if you looked at this, and you didn't see the metal clip, it's probably inside these holes right here. If that was the case, you'd want to just take them out, okay? You can use something like a pocket screwdriver or whatever you have to do. Get them out of there. Put them back on this, okay? You can't just go ahead and put this plastic into those metal clips if they're down there. They just going to work that way.

So anyway, we're going to line up these with these holes, being careful not to scratch any of our paint. Just like always, we're trying real hard to do a good job here. Slides under there. This up here. Got holes lined up. Just give it a little bonk. Bonk, bonk. Just slid it in there. We got four push clips. One here, one there, here, and there, okay? You can do them in any order. You do your booboo.

Just put them in and then push in the center. Slide it in. Push in the center. On to the last, slide it in, push in the center. This under here, it should go right in there. Very nice. Okay, let me get this puppy lined up. There's just the little hole in it right there. That slides over this, okay? It's just like a rain drip guard type of deal. Here we are. Looks pretty great. We'll do the same to the other side, and then we're all set.

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