The 4 Week Long Buick Job: A car that just would not cooperate for its state inspection testing without an inspired idea

Let us get on to a nifty trick I came up with on a 2008 Buick Lucerne to get it to run its emissions monitors as it was below zero degrees outside for all the time it was at the shop to get worked on.

Check engine light, lean codes, well neglected vehicle that needs brakes all the way around amongst an inspection and some other stuff. It ran several of its monitors after we fixed some of the issues with the motor but, for its year, it can only have 1 emissions readiness monitor "not ready." It occurred to me, when I looked up the drive cycle given by the manufacturer, that one of the 2 monitors that would not run required a bunch of doable conditions that were not temperature dependent except for its requirement that the ambient air temperature be above 39 degrees. Not only was this the only thing holding us back but this vehicle actually had a stand alone ambient temperature sensor. An idea popped into my head.

What if we extended the wires from the connector with enough wire that we could put the ambient air temperature sensor inside the vehicle? That way, if we left it in over night, it would always have an ambient temperature above 60 degrees since we can run the heat in the vehicle while going down the road. I had suggested using one of our trailer wiring harnesses to get enough wire to do what we needed but we actually had a nice lead/wire set for diagnostic purposes that was more then satisfactory for what we needed. Ten minutes later the car was ready for inspection and could not be delivered. This is the kind of stuff that I find fun :)