I cast mend butt crack followed by diarrhea

Forty bucks is a ripoff. I got a Bluetooth one for like 10.

Here they charge you for the readout 🙂

If $40 is too much for you, Auto Zone, Advance Auto Parts, and O'Reillys all have free code readers you can use. If your car can make it there.

Yeah, mine just started nagging me about some emissions bull shit as soon as it rolled over to 100,000 miles.

Yep. Now when the fuel light turns on. Tears

It never occurred to me I could just buy my own in lieu of the weekly trips to auto zone. Do you have any brand recommendations (only what to stay away from)?

My car gets angery when I plug in my cheapo Bluetooth OBD2 thingy. Like "ESD service required" angery and I have to unplug the thingy and restart the car to clear it.

Totally fine after that.

Is my Bluetooth thingy too cheapo?

My previous car didn't care at all. It was older though and didn't have ESD and all that.

Edit for future travelers:

I looked it up and yes it looks like (especially) cheap ones can interfere. It seems the likelihood of it actually breaking something is low but bad quality wiring in cheap electronics can be a factor in these "ghost problems".

Or if your car is old enough, and you don’t mind investing some cash, you might find the official diagnostics equipment available on eBay.

With a bit of hacking about you can program new keys, train in new parts etc etc.

That sucks big time, emergency vet visits are always rough. Best of luck to you and your pup. Hope you can get in and get things figured out safe and quick.

I got one, swapped a part myself, realized that wasn't it, went to my mechanic, and he fixed it just by guessing lol

But yea they are useful so you at least know the exact codes that you fixed

Your local library may also have one you can borrow if it has a library of things. It a pretty cool.

I drive an EV. I have no engine.

I have a Lexus and a Toyota, both 9 years old. Do they even have a check engine light? I hope so, because I forgot where the dealer is.

I cast run over by self driving car

(Hope n ot)

Yeah wouldn't fly here. Instant failure on the annual safety and emissions check

But if it's an intermittent code you can just clear it and hope it doesn't come back lol

What's wild is that edge in the eighties when we were getting around to fuel injection. If you had a carb, you had to know a little bit about maintenance. But by like 87/88 everything is fuel injected and it's awesome. Especially if you have port injection cause you're cleaning your valves too. Worked with a WW2 vet who was explaining to me about when they first started adding sodium to valves and how revolutionary that was because they used to have to get their valves ground and reworked periodically. When have you ever heard anyone talk about their valves? But that's like something people needed to know about back then.

Marker pen over the light and they won't know any difference.

Brakes fail while you are rocketing downhill at 30mph. Hope you dressed for the slide, not the ride.

My state won't let you register a car that has a check engine light on. So, yeah, checkmate.

This is the way. You open it up and you're introducing more chaos. Guess you'll just need to be a little vigilant when the light comes on to make sure you're not running into any other issues.

That being said, you can usually feel if there's a problem. Or smell, but if you smell the problem it's usually too late.

I've been driving with a P302 code for almost 3 years now, miss fire on piston 2. Mechanic scoped it and the valve was off by less then a hairs width. Him and another mechanic agreed not worth fixing.

Happened to me last month :( cylinder misfire ended up being a bad injector dripping gas onto the piston, they pulled the whole fuel rail to get it. Cost like $2k. I hope not you too!

For modern cars, when the manufacturer wants a little extra for this month's performance review so you you gotta take it to the first-party garage as everything is VIN locked.

Anything that affects emissions has to trigger it. Even a loose gas tank cap I believe. Other than that, the manufacturer may choose to trigger it on any number of powertrain issues, depending on what they have sensors for.

The un-conspiracy-pilled response:

The CEL (Check Engine Light) comes on when the engine computer detects an error in the data from one or more of the engine's sensors. It can be something as simple as the engine is stalled, or you forgot to tighten your fuel cap, and it can be something as severe as engine knock/misfire (typically the light flashes at that time), catalytic converter meltdown, or some other major hardware failure. Use any scan tool to check the codes, then lookup the codes to see what they are. It'll give you a good idea of what is wrong with the car. Sometimes its a corroded sensor wire, sometimes the sensor has gone and disintegrated itself, sometimes there is a hardware failure in the engine and the sensor data is abnormal because of it. Use the Torque app and a cheap obd2 reader compatible with your car, or a dedicated code reader / scan tool from the auto parts store. You can also reset the light with the tool, but if there is an actual problem it will show up again after a bit.

Bad gas cap

Flashing is a misfire event detected. Your engine may have managed to cough out whatever was causing that cylinder not to fire. A blockage in the fuel injector most likely, at least if it managed to cure itself.

This is me with Torque. I know I have a blown head gasket (yay wrx owner problems), but I don't care about cylinder bank two rich conditions because it's one hundred and ten plus fucking degrees here, which makes one of my injectors become an overachiever.

Mine straight up burned out several years ago. Still runs and passes inspection. I ain't no coward.