Posted on 1/30/2026
Yes, the light can be reset. That’s the easy part. The bigger question is what you’re actually accomplishing when you reset it. In most cases, turning the check engine light off without fixing the cause is like turning off a smoke alarm without dealing with the smoke. The warning goes away, but the condition that triggered it is still sitting there, waiting for the right moment to show up again. There are a few situations where a reset makes sense, but it depends on what caused the light in the first place. What “Resetting” The Light Really Does Resetting the check engine light usually means clearing the stored fault codes from the engine computer. That can be done with a scan tool, sometimes by disconnecting the battery, and sometimes by meeting certain drive cycle conditions in which the computer turns the light off after it stops seeing the fault. When you clear codes, you also clear valuable stored information. That includes the snapshot ... read more