BeigeJournal

I had my 1995 Subaru Impreza in the shop Friday because its computer was unhappy with something, causing it to light up the “check engine” light. It turned out to be the knock sensor. This is now the third knock sensor this engine has had, which I suppose is not completely unreasonable for nearly nine years and nearly 175000 kilometers. My own feeling is that I’d prefer if the computer could tell me, the user, that it was having a problem with the knock sensor, rather than just telling me that it had a problem with something. You can get handy little devices that plug into the OBD port for fairly reasonable prices, which would be fine if I was actually planning on fixing the problem myself, but I’m not. I’m going to pay someone to fix it, but when I start the car up in the parking lot at work and the engine computer detects a problem, I’d like to know, right then and there, that it’s just the knock sensor (again). Apparently not many consumers feel this way. Probably most of them wouldn’t know what the knock sensor is for anyway. I suppose I’m used to open-source Unix software, which tends to spew detailed error messages even when, for all practical purposes, it’s working just fine.