I just got a CEL on my way home today and I'm sure it wasn't the gas cap being loose. So I checked the dip-stick for my oil and my oil was low. I immediatly went to walmart and got 1qt of Mobile1 synthetic oil 10w30 and put it all in. My oil went up a couple notches, but the light is still on.

Anyway, when I got home I noticed that the car shakes at idle and when I checked my exhaust is making a choking sound. Would low oil cause these things to happen and would low oil make the CEL come on?

Thanks for any help

 

take it to autozone or discount auto parts and have them pull the code. or do the manual code pull. if you do the manual code pull be careful not to fry your ecu!

 

Low oil level in itself, won't throw a CEL. Get it scanned, then see what the next step will be.

Just how "low" was it to begin with? For it to go up "a couple notches", it had to have been well below the "add" mark. 1qt would have taken it from the "add" all the way up to the full mark. Even still, if it was actually 1qt low, it wouldn't throw the CEL due to oil starvation damaging something.

 

before i added the oil it was on the X right above the L. when i filled it up with 1qt it went up 2 X's which is about the middle. should i add enough for it to reach the H?

also, i reset the ecu for the light to go away and then drive it around a lil to see if it would come back. after about 30 miles of driving, the light hasn't come back on.

 

Odd. L to H is 1 quart.

 

We should start a Darwins Award for car owners.

You don't reset the CEL UNTIL you know what it is. You don't guess, you don't ignore it, you don't reset it! I see a large repair bill in your future.

 

well im gonna take it autozone anyway to see why the cel went on in the first place. i just wanted to see if i reset the ecu, if it wold come back on after some driving.

i added the oil when the car was warm so that might be the reason why it didn't go up to the H.

 

now that you reset the ecu there will be no code. good job

 

hmmm... well i guess that's my fault. shouldn't the engine light come up again if something was still wrong?

 

It might. If it was something like a random misfire, it may not come back anytime soon or at all. One of the things you do when diagnosing a random misfire is to reset the ECU. Of course, there are other steps in this but the premise is that it might not come back if it's random.