Emissions test failure

[Jeff Dooley]

Hello everyone, this is for anyone who has to do emissions testing.

I recently brought my 05 Cobalt in for a emissions test. I was surprised when the technician told me that he could not preform the test on my vehicle because, when he plugged the OBD2 connector to my car, it told him that there was a low voltage reading on one of the pins. This confused me at first because I have never heard of this happening. He then told me that I would have to get a technician to run diagnostics on all of the vehicles electrical systems. Now I dont know much about what that involves but I do know it would be costly, so I did research online and found that sometimes there could be a fuse problem causing a low voltage reading. So after looking at all the main fuses to make sure all were good and not blown, I decided to check the not so important ones. What i found out is that I had a 15A fuse blown for my cigarette lighter/accessory port. This was the only blown fuse, so after replacing that, I brought it back and passed the test no problem. I would have never thought a little fuse for nothing more then a cigarette/accessory would cause a failure in the Emissions test.

So if you ever have a failure, do not rule out fuses, no matter how insignificant you think it is.

Sorry for the long post, but I hope this helps a few people out.

Topic

[Bill]

With so many people plugging things into the power receptacle these days it’s common to find no power on pin #16 of the diagnostic connector. The tester needs to have power there to communicate with your car.
Sometimes the fuse is marked as most GM cars are but other brands of cars are not marked and have to be identified before the correct fuse can be replaced. This takes time and time is money.

[Author]

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