I took my car to get its annual smog and failed the tail pipe portion passed but the Self diagnostics showed 2 items not passing readiness. They are Secondary air injection and Cat efficiency. Yet I had no fault codes. I took it to my local Indy to check for pending codes and nothing showed up. He reset it and still the same two items do not pass readiness. I have been running with 70mm exhaust from speedtech for almost four years now and have not had issues before. I am running with new larger turbos and tune with ultimate motorworks. Anyone have any ideas what could be causing my problem?

 

Has your battery been disconnected recently? It takes about 100 miles of driving and several shutdowns and starts to reset the readiness after codes are cleared or a battery has been out.

 

Almost every time I've seen this, it's the ECU tune. Some tunes "force" the OBDii readiness monitors to never set, so that you never get CELs even if you run catless. However, they never pass an OBDii emissions check. Not sure about UMW, so can't confirm/deny anything specific.

So, I'm not saying that's your issue here, but I would talk with Kevin @ UMW and make 100% sure it's not the tune, before driving hundreds of miles and pulling your hair out attempting myriad other fixes that might have no effect.

 

John the battery has not been disconnected and I have driven several hundred miles since I have failed the test twice hoping that the ecu will reset. My Indy suggested that it might be the tune so I did chat with Kevin and he suggests the cats in the exhaust may have gone bad. But wouldn't that set off a fault code?

 

My original tune with UMW never had a problem, but with the new upgrade I'm not sure?

 

I do not have any experience or history of bad cats causing a "readiness issue", so I am unsure what to say. A bad cat will usually cause a CELight. And we sold a ton of those 70mm systems and I have never seen this on any of them, nor have I had any bad cat issues on them. I believe I have heard of a similar "readiness" problem in another instance and a re-tune was the solution, but again I am not certain.

Since you suddenly have two readiness issues and the ECU was recently modified, I would look at the ECU first. I would try a re-flash back to the previous program and test the readiness to see what happens...but you may have to drive it 100 miles after a re-flash. Usually, if you don't "get on it hard" a different tune will be OK for easy cruising, but check to make sure.

 

+1. If sensors have been shut down, the readiness codes will never pass smog. These will NOT throw a fault. It's the tune. Check with UMW.