What is OBD II and why you should you care. If your check engine light is on now or has ever come on in the past becoming familiar with the system has some advantages. These auto repairs can be technical in nature and therefore expensive.
You can learn about OBD II diagnostic systems and hold down car repair costs in two ways. After learning enough about the OBD II system you may decide to perform some initial diagnosis on your own. Of course it will depend on your situation, but you might be able to perform some do it yourself auto repair of your own check engine light.
Secondly, if you decide to take your vehicle in for professional auto repairs, your basic understanding of the onboard diagnostic systems will help you negotiate with the repair center from an educated position.
Sometimes a check engine light repair may not be straight forward and require more diagnostic time. A blank check to the car repair center could be the result unless you are educated about system operation.
Obd II is twice as smart as Obd I
The onboard diagnostics generation II was developed in response to the federal government, along with the state of California to comply with their emission control system-monitoring standards.
The main goal of this system was to detect when engine wear or component failure caused exhaust emissions to increase by 50% or more. OBD II also called for standard service procedures without the use of dedicated special tools.
To accomplish these goals manufacturers needed to change many aspects of their electronic engine control systems. According to the guidelines of the OBD II mandate all automobiles should have a universal diagnostic test connector known as a DLC or data Link connector.
These DLC connections will be mounted in a easy to see location under the drivers side lower dash. A standard list of diagnostic trouble codes using the society of automotive engineers (SAE) standard J2012.
The OBD system must turn on the check engine light if the vehicle conditions would allow emissions to exceed 1.5 times the allowable standard for that model year. Besides enhancements to the computer’s capacities, some additional hardware is required to monitor the emissions performance closely enough to fulfill the tighter mandates.
In most cases this hardware consists of additional heated oxygen sensors down stream from the catalytic converter to measure how it is doing at cleaning the exhaust.
Onboard diagnostic capabilities are incorporated into a vehicle’s onboard computer to monitor virtually every component that can affect an emission performance. Each component is checked by a diagnostic routine to verify that it is functioning properly.
Was OBD I that bad
OBD I was the first generation of onboard diagnostics systems and was designed to monitor some of the vehicle’s emission control components. They are Mandated on vehicles from 1991 and up. OBD-I systems were not as effective as possible, because they monitored only a few of the components and were not calibrated to specific level of emission system performance.
OBD two was developed to address these shortfalls of its predecessor and has also allowed more accurate diagnosis by professional auto mechanics. The older the vehicle gets the more chance that you will see a check engine light come on. Sometimes also related to the age of the vehicle is the difficulty in diagnosing the malfunction.
The electrical wire harness and connectors that allow the many parts to talk to each other were mandated by the government to last for ten years or 100k miles.
The further a vehicle gets away from this milestone, the more likely a hard-to-find electrical problem could develop. This is why I believe that learning car repair is a valuable skill set even if you do not plan to fix it yourself.
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