How to Replace Throttle Body 2008-12 Chevy Malibu

Okay, friends, to get started on our throttle body, we're going to have to find it first. To do that, you'd want to find your air filter housing, follow it like this, and it's going to be located right under there. Obviously, we need to get this out of the way. We're going to come right over here with our 8-millimeter, loosen up this clamp, then we're going to come right here with some pliers and get this hose off of there.

Now I'm going to use my 8-millimeter with a short extension, and I'm going to come right under here and I'm going to try to get to the clamp right there. Just loosen that up a little bit like you did before. Now we have a nice, clear view of our throttle body. Right here's the wiring. You're going to see this little gray piece. That's a lock. We need to get that right out of there. So I'm just going to use my small pocket screwdriver, I'll kind of work it like this, and then there's a little tab that I need to press on and pull it out. There's the tab. Press on this centerpiece, give it a little wiggle, draw it out. I always look for funny colors. If you see any, you need to either clean it or replace your pigtail. This looks good. Now we need to remove our four mounting bolts.

There it is, friends. The next thing we want to do is carefully clean down this gasket area. You definitely want to make sure that you don't go ahead and push anything inside of this. If you do, you need to make sure you get it out. Once you feel as though you have it nice and clean and you can inspect it and tell that there's no cracks in it, take a tiny bit of motor oil on your finger and then just come right along that gasket itself. This is just to add a little bit of lubricant to it. You definitely don't want to use something such as gasoline or kerosene or anything like that though. Now it's going to be time to install our brand new throttle body. Carefully place it right over this like that, start in all four of your bolts, we'll snug them up and then we'll torque them to manufacturer specifications.

Now we're going to go ahead and torque down our bolts to 89 inch-pounds. So let's look at the bottom area of this where it connects onto the throttle body. You want to make sure that it's nice and clean and it doesn't have any corrosion or debris. If it does, just go ahead and wipe it out of there. All right. Let's get this cover on the engine. We want this hole to line up with the throttle body and of course the oil cap area to line up with this hole. I'm just going to feel underneath, I should be able to line it up. There we are. Carefully press down. As you push down, if it feels as though it doesn't want to slide down easily, you need to be careful because if you pin over the rubber on there and it doesn't make a good connection up against the throttle body, there's a possibility you could suck dirty air into the engine which would be very bad.

You definitely want to tighten this clamp before you forget about it. Let's give it a nice tug, make sure it's completely secure. Let's go ahead and get our lock back on this. Wrong way. Give it a nice tug, make sure it's completely secure. Let's get this hose back on. You can see that it's lined up, tighten it up. Your hose. Perfect. Just double-check, this is nice and tight. The next thing you'd want to do is start up your vehicle, check for a runnability issue, make sure you don't have a misfire, take it for a road test and watch for a check engine light.