Quote:
Originally Posted by soconfoozed
And another thing...
Why the hell in an age of multiline displays do we even HAVE a single "check engine" light. That is such a hateful user interface. "Something is wrong. It could be big, it could be small, we give you no indication." Really? REALLY? How about telling me what's ACTUALLY wrong with my car. Assholes.
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A number of reasons. First they don't want to overwhelm a driver with too much info. If they had half a dozen lights come on while you're on the highway it could distract to a dangerous degree. This is something that's actually pretty carefully considered by various agencies and the car makers themselves.
Then they also don't want to give just enough information to be dangerous. An engine code may or may not have an obvious sounding cause but even given an obvious name it might be caused by something else. Would you be more or less pissed if you replaced a sensor yourself that an indication seemed to point to and it didn't fix anything?
Another reason is that manufacturers don't want to give away all the information about what's going on in the ECU. If you start getting into the nuts and bolts of what sets a specific code (which would be the next step) they have to tell you more and more about their software. This gets dicey concerning intellectual property and international exports. This is all commercial (non military) so that's not as bad but still can be a pain.
Source: I design and support ECU software for engines.