IMA light = bad ground straps?

So a couple of weeks ago while I was running to the library I noticed my car’s IMA light was on (2001 Honda Insight) and it was performing like crap. After almost getting T boned on the way home I started thinking about what I could do. Since the dealership near me charges $80 bucks to pull the diag codes from the OBD I didn’t want to pay that but it turned out a friend of mine had an OBD reader that he’s be willing to use.

So I drive out to his house and we pull two codes. The first is a P0134 which means that the oxygen sensor is bad (bye bye $400) and the second code is even worse because it’s a P1449 which means the battery pack overheated and usually it’s a full replacement. Thankfully for me thanks to a class action lawsuit I still have 2 months warranty on my battery pack. So I went into the dealership confident that I’d be able to scrape past this issue barely but it turns out that they say the battery isn’t bad but the ground strap was severed and the O2 sensor needs replacement.

Now I don’t know that much about cars but it seems to me that fixing the cheap part first and clearing the codes seems a better course of action. After all if the ground strap to the engine block had broken off then wouldn’t that possibly impact the O2 sensor that is connected to it? Why not replace the ground strap and see if the error throws again?

I don’t think that looks right

They wanted $60 bucks to order the ground straps and put them in. So $24 dollars later I had OEM straps being delivered to my house for me to install. In the mean time I cobbled together a temp strap out of some aluminum wire I had around (which actually worked quite well) and drove about 60 miles (getting 60mpg) with none of the errors coming back.

The installed the straps without much trouble. The hardest part of the whole deal is taking bits of the cold air intake apart (one 10mm bold next to the filter box) everything else is pretty much straight forward.

My temp ground strap

Old straps compared to the new ones

New straps installed

So far so good. I haven’t really traveled any great distances yet but the error codes still haven’t popped up quite yet. Of course the goal is to monitor for them and hopefully they’ll pop up in the next couple of months. To be honest a two seater car just isn’t cutting it with three kids so I don’t know for how much longer I’ll be owning this car…as much as I hate to say it.