[jcp123]

Originally Posted by War_Wagon

Hmmm. You'd think that with all the fancy lights down along the bottom of the dash they'd have made the check engine light one of the bigger, easier to understand ones? Maybe it's the "Maintenance required" light? AKA the - "Nobody in this country knows how to reset the oil change light on your weirdo 25 year old Japanese diesel" light?

The thing about older FI setups is that there was no requirement or standardization about having any kind of check engine light. Many had none at all or if they did, they were hidden. CEL's were considered a higher-level technician's thing, intended as an indicator for the mechanic to remind him (her?) to check fault codes when the vehicle was brought in for an existing problem. Such systems are broadly called OBD 0. California was a pioneer in requiring well-marked CEL's on the instrument panel, and those were correctly called OBD I. OBDII was not just a US federal mandate, it also brought car companies to broadly standardize global models for both the same fault code protocols and scan tool connections, as well as more convenient check engine light placement in the instrument clusters.