Hey y’all - Thanks for your opinions on this. I took my 2004 Honda Accord LX (24,620 mi) to the local dealership for an oil change and top-to-bottom checkup because I’m selling it. I’ve never had a warning light come on, EVER, in this car. But, less than 24 hours after driving away from the dealership with a clean bill of Honda health, my check engine light came on. I couldn’t take the car back to the dealership for a week due to scheduling, but when I did I was told that an O2 sensor had “just happened to go bad” after the service and that it had absolutely no correlation to anything the Honda guys had done to my car. I told them, in sailor terms, that I didn’t believe it. The question is, could they have done something during an oil change that would have corrupted my O2 sensor? It’s a moot point at this juncture, but I just want to know so I can bad-mouth them to an appropriate level in the future. Thanks a bunch!
I would check the wires and connectors for damage under the car and hood, 24k miles is not enough for the life of those sensors…
Stuff happens!
There’s nothing that could be done to the O2 sensor that would delay the Check Engine light from coming on for 24 hours for an O2 sensor code. If any of the wires were cut to the O2 sensor, the Check Engine light would have come on within minutes after leaving the dealer.
Tester
How about getting the codes read at AutoZone (it’s free) as a first step. You state you had a “top-to-bottom checkup”. What does that mean?
Maybe during this mysterious checkup a vacuum line or something like that was inadvertently dislodged and the O2 is not really bad at all.
Until the cause of this failure is positively identified I would suggest you hold back on the sailor language and bad mouthing of the dealer rather than risk winding up with egg on your face in the event this problem is entirely random; and entirely random defines a lot of problems on modern cars.