Mil light triggers

[ahidley]

Hopefully this is a simple question. There are many mil lights, aka check engine lights. Some are triggered after one fault and others are triggered after several. For clairty let's say 4 fails out of 10 tests causes the mil to light up. So, if I clear fault codes does this reset the triggers to zero also? Or does it just extinguish the mil light. If that's the case then a mil could be triggered the next time the car is started, vs the next 10 times and 4 fails as listed above.

 

[davisev5225]

If you want a precise answer, you're going to need to provide a full, unedited and unabridged auto-scan. That said, generally speaking, any single code can cause a MIL light to illuminate. The codes that do so will generally say "MIL ON" somewhere in their fault description.

 

[EuroX]

Most codes will not return unless a fail result is entered during a test consistently usually after 3-10 key cycles. In other cases the fault are intermittent.

 

[Uwe]

Hopefully this is a simple question.

It really isn't. Various fault conditions will have different criteria for setting the MIL.

-Uwe-

 

[ahidley]

Perhaps I can simplify my question with more detail. Let's say u have 2 pending mils. We'll call them mil A and mil B . Both mils require multiple Faults to trigger the mil light. I'm not too concerned about what causes it just the amount of failures adding up. So say mil A and B are triggered after 5 fails out of 10 tests. Now A and B are differant Faults as well as differant tests and are not related to each other. So in this example mil A gets triggered and mil B only has 4 fails out of the 10 cycles. So I go into vcds and delete milA . What has happened?
The mil light for A is extinguished.
Has the fault list been reset to zero out of zero tries for mil A?
Has it also reset the 4 fails for mil B? I assume not.
What happens if I disconnect power from the battery ? Does that reset the milA light and reset the fails on A and B?

Just trying to understand what's actually happening..

 

[SaVAGeSoot]

Based on what I've experienced, you cannot selectively clear codes.... you wipe everything....

 

[Uwe]

you cannot selectively clear codes.... you wipe everything....

Correct. But just to be clear, not everything in the whole car, just everything within a particular control module, because there isn't any way to selectively clear faults in a control module.

-Uwe-