You ever think about how the check engine light is this horrible, centralizing, disempowering thing? And that it’s like that by design? Auto makers put a little computer in every car that monitors the engine for all kinds of potential issues, but the user facing output of this is a light that just constantly screams “take this to a dealership and give us money”. Imagine if instead they spent $0.005 on a couple seven segment displays and showed an error code.
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in reply to @bruno's post:
My car stalled today and thank God my dad is a car guy and owns the code reader cause now we can actually get the parts and do the work ourselves.
There's a CAN reader at auto parts stores like autozone that read that, borrowing it and getting the printout is free but they do suggest things to buy off of that. Unfortunately that still requires going out to check that.
Only recently did I fiddle in the menus and my car from 2016 has a submenu to check engine status information. I have yet to see if it'll show codes under there.
The thing is, anyone who could use that information themselves knows to buy a scan tool, and anyone who couldn't use that information themselves is just frightened to see it.
buy a car with a high enough trim level to have an oil pressure gauge and it'll be fucking fake. It'll leave the needle in the middle when there's oil and drop it into an un-numbered red zone when there's no oil, and all because if grandpa saw it do something scary like move in according to actual real oil pressure he'll come to the dealership and complain that the engine is broken
My vehicle popped up an “engine fault detected” message a few times this summer, disappearing a few minutes later. It logged no codes and in fact it turned out there was no engine fault either.
There was a transmission fault, but it seemed to think it would be a fun game to notice that and then give me as little information as possible to understand what action to take.
Fwiw you can usually take your car to a place like Autozone and they have a device that they can use to tell you what kind of problem you have. I did this a couple of years ago with a 'check engine' light, worried it was something expensive like the transmission but it turns out I needed a new gas cap.