Nitto Mid-Pipe Check Engine Light fix

[03Z33]

Originally Posted by YarisSedan

Why are you guys removing your cats anyways. 1 you remove all the backpressure which you need. Sure you will get more power but you are seriousely going to impact your fuel economy which is why most of us bought this car in the first place? Second for the slight power you are going to achive which could be only 5hp at the most as opposed to doing a midpipe from the cat back. You are going to cause an extreme amount of polution. As well as mess up egr function. Not to mention how loud it is going to be. So now if you dont like this sound you will have to choose to have a restrictive muffler to muffle the sound which you could just have a nice open muffler with a cat since a cat muffles sound more than your muffler does.

Also I know in california check engine light is automatic smog failure. Not to mention it would automatically fail anyways since you have no cat.

Unless someone can prove me wrong and have thier vehicle smoged without any cats on it would be interesting to see how much emissions our little engines produce. We do have 2 cats though and its not a zero emission vehicle even with those 2 cats. HC is going to be low probally but it probally has a problem with nox

Just wanted to add my "$.02"...

1. My idle is smoother with the Nitto mid-pipe (less RPM hunting than stock)

2. My MPG is same or better than before the mid-pipe (consistent 37-42 MPG without any special tricks and A/C on 80% of the time)

3. Sound is 1,000,000 times better than stock IMHO. In fact I'm not running any muffler at all, just straight piping from the mid-pipe back to dual tips.

4. It takes a few days of driving for my CEL to return so I could always clear it and then get the car smogged before it returned

5. Our car is a ULEVII and not a PZEV, so I am confident it may actually pass smog without the cats in place, my 2003 350Z which was also a ULEVII passed without any cats in place just less than 1 year ago.

Keep in mind that I was one of the first to purchase this mid-pipe and did not know at the time that the "cats" are dummies, if I had known that this is removing the cats I may have not purchased. Now that I've had it on the car for a while, it's hard to imagine going back to stock, the sound and feel are just great!

Originally Posted by kurokoma-kun

oh, i'm not clearing them, just unhooking the negative battery terminal and resetting the ecu.

if i had a scangauge would the cel code tell me if its a leak at the collector? thats the other thing i suspect besides the O2 sensor, i was afraid of overtightening the spring bolts

By checking the DTC code, which can be done at most auto parts such as Autozone for free, you would be able to tell if the code is for "cat-inefficiency" or otherwise. That may be able to help you trouble shoot. In all honesty I believe that is most likely why you have the CEL as it's very unlikely that you'd have a leak that you couldn't either hear (vacuum hissing sound) or feel (by idling the car and inspecting from below).


Oh, and BTW, ROCKLAND is an annoying idiot! Why hasn't he been banned yet?