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shut up you're injured come for the Scottie Kilmer job today I'm going to tell you the truth about check engine lights when they come on in your car. A lot of people see a check engine light and they freak out. Now it can be a serious problem or can be something hardly means anything at all. Here's how you find out. You get a scan tool, then you go to the OBD part and you plug it in so it can read the data. In this case, being a jam product, you can see there's four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 different codes, which on the surface of it is pretty odd because the car is actually running quite well.
Now the first code is for an erratic wheel speed sensor on the right rear tire. Now that I know because the ABS light comes on and off every once in a while, so the problem with the ABS sensor back there probably. Now many people will live with that because ABS brakes revert to non-ABS normal brakes when they go off, or are you to buy an expensive hub assembly, because you can buy the whole hub with the sensor in it for this car.
Now the next two codes are your ABS codes too, this one and this one, so we can pretty much ignore them if we don't care about the ABS. But this code here, P0014, is a code for the variable valve timing system, which often gets a little bit weak on these cars for various reasons. If there are cold trips and the car runs okay, you can just ignore it. Now if it starts running poorly, you can do things like change the engine oil, dirty engine oil can do that, change the cam shift sensor assembly because they can go bad, or sometimes you have to replace the entire cam assembly. But if it runs okay, that's something you can live with. The P0013 code is also one of those cam timing codes, same basic thing.
Now here's a trick I've been doing for years with all those codes. Since it really runs okay, the first thing I'm going to do is erase them all and drive it. I will just go to erase codes and press enter, and we erase the codes. It's doing its thing, erasing the codes. Now they're cleared, none of them exist, and as you can see the lights are off. So we'll take it for a spin. Now the ABS light has come back on, so we know there's a problem with that system. With all the codes that the customer is going to really fix, it sounds good enough. You can take the fuse out, just disconnect the ABS entirely and go back to normal brakes. But as you can see, the check engine light has not come back on. So in this case, the other codes for the cam are not serious codes, because it didn't come back on after a serious drive for about an hour.
Now they may come and go as you drive the car over months, but if the car runs okay, it's not really going to hurt anything driving it that way. But if the code comes back on, or if the check engine light is flashing while you're driving, then it's a serious problem. Just realize that the computer is always checking your car, and if it finds a problem, it's going to turn a check engine light on. If while driving it turns off and then comes on again later, it's finding a problem that's really a minor problem, and I wouldn't worry about it until it gets more serious. I've seen people spend thousands of dollars trying to track down a problem in their car, when instead, if they had waited weeks or months, or even sometimes years, for the problem to get big enough that it became a permanent code, it would have been easy to trace down rather than spend a bunch of money on parts that didn't even fix the problem, because they were guessing. Yes, sometimes patience is a virtue, even with check engine lights. I remember, if you've got any car questions, just visit the Scottie Kilmer channel.