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Yes Posted by Ari [Email] (#2847) [Profile/Gallery] (more from Ari) on Thu, 19 Aug 2004 05:51:58 In Reply to: Is is safe to drive a car with a bad O2 sensor?, Julia, Thu, 19 Aug 2004 05:03:19 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
When the engine control detects a bad O2 sensor, it adjusts the fuel mixture to a 'safe' one - usually a little rich. That prevents knock. You might see a minor drop in gas mileage. I wouldn't recommend driving this way for months, as it'll tend to foul the plugs. But for a few days, or even a few weeks, no big deal.
Look at it this way - most O2 sensors die over a long period of time. At some point the performance is such that the engine control flags it as a fault. But it probably spent a long time at "almost dead". The car is doing fine.
I would caution you though - what is the indication that says the O2 sensor is bad? Is it just the Fault Code? If so, that's not necessarily the right answer. The ECU will pop out an O2 sensor fault if the sensor doesn't seem to be reading right - too rich or too lean. That could be due to a bad sensor. But if something else is causing the engine to run at the wrong mixture - a vacuum leak causing lean running, a bad Fuel Pressure Regulator or sticky fuel injector causing rich running - the O2 sensor could be telling the truth. So it requires a little more troubleshooting to tell. That may be as simple as pulling the spark plugs and looking to see if they are running rich or lean, and then sticking a voltmeter on the O2 sensor to see what it says. If the O2 sensor says lean and the spark plugs say lean, then the O2 sensor is OK.
Yeah, sorry, that makes life more complex. Fault codes aren't all they're cracked up to be.
posted by 192.249....
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