First CEL at 24,000 miles

[mspalmer]

I've had my 2005 Vibe for almost 2 years and my wife noticed our first check-engine-light on her way home from work tonight. I'll be taking it in tomorrow to see what is going on. She said everything was running as it should. I'll keep everyone posted. I hope they don't need to keep it for more than a day or two.Mike

[mspalmer]

For any interested: turned out to be my oxygen sensor. Couple problems, though. First, the service department opens at 7:00 but none of the service technicians arrives until 8:00. So I sat around for an hour. Then he comes to tell me that they don't have the part in stock and won't have it for a couple hours. So my wife had to bundle up the 2 little girls and come pick me up.We'll see how the car drives afterward, I didn't notice it driving poorly with the CEL on.Mike

[Ol' Timer]

The O2 Sensor should not cause any driveabilty issues. It will cause a MPG issue as your gas mileage will suffer. I've never had one throw a code but I have replaced mine between 75K and 100K miles in my other cars.Pontiac didn't have the O2 Sensor in stock? Gee, what a surprise. About the ONLY thing they stock for our cars is the Oil Filters(and Oil). The rest they have to send someone to Toyota to fetch.

[Cougar Vibe]

I hate the way auto manufacturers have implimented the CEL warning light as a catch all for hundreds of problems. Not to hijack the thread, but I've been fighting a CEL on my Ford Ranger for over a year now. Taking it to a dealer was out of the question, since the truck is only worth $3K and to have them diagnose it would have been two hours labor plus FoMoCo parts ($$$). I did the AutoZone thing, but the code I was throwing (P1401) was fairly generic. Anyway, I finally had given up since I didn't really notice much of a gas mileage drop, but then my local municipality began emissions testing. Thus, back to the drawing board. Believe it or not, it took four (4) DPFE sensors before the code finally cleared! First one was from AZ ($38), second was Motorcraft from a junk yard ($60), third was Schucks ($48) and finally, a new Motorcraft from the dealer ($105). After all that run around, and knowing that it was the DPFE the whole time, it was a hard lesson to learn. What AZ and Schucks didn't volunteer was that they sell the old Motorcraft design, which had numerous failure issues. Apparently water gets in the DPFE over time and shorts it out; what pisses me off is that they don't give you any info about that and FoMoCo is selling designs for parts that they know are failure prone. Oh well, at least I don't have that damn yellow light staring me down anymore.

[joatmon]

Vibes get two O2 sensors. The front one affects fuel/air mixture, so I could see where it might affect engine performance. Might not. The second one is just to monitor the performance of the cat converter, it wouldn't affect driveability or mpg.I once had a vehicle that a particular ingition on/off sequence would get the CEL to flash out the error code, that was handy. Now I have a scanguage.I have an older Ranger, electrical reliability seems to be an issue. http://www.therangerstation.com/ has been a useful resource.