Gents: My 2006's gas cap has never been replaced, what is the approximate life expectancy on it ? I am trying to avoid the check engine light coming up in the future but I don't want to over react & spend unnecessary money either. Any feedback would be appreciate it. Thanks.
If it works, don't fix it. I have very old cars of 15+ years with no OBD II "gas cap" fault problems. It all depends on the "seal."
my 04 was still fine at 94,000 miles. people have run up some high mileage on these vehicles and i can't remember seeing it mentioned before.
I had to change the gas cap on my wife's Tacoma at somewhere over 100k miles. It kept getting check engine lights from the cap. To the OP if your cap is not triggering your CEL I would not just arbitrarily change it unless you are having problems. Posted from my iPhone via the Tapatalk app.
A check engine light is easy to get a code from. Most autopart stores will take out the code reader to the car to pull it for you. Advance auto parts and Oreilly auto parts are two examples. Once you have the code, you will know exactly what is wrong, and if it's the gas cap, then replace. I can understand the concern, thinking that if the light is on you have to go to the dealer to figure out what it is and that seems costly, but the reality it, it's easy to get the codes. Of course there is a set of codes that these scanners can't read, but this isn't one of those.
Thank you for all the feedback so far. I feel better now that I know it is not a required item that falls under scheduled maintenance. Also knowing that certain auto parts can assist me w/ codes is very assuring.
A friend of mine just replaced his gas cap on a Gen1. The car has about 180,000 miles on it, and this is the first real problem. Cost him $150 for the dealer to diagnose & repair it. If you're worried about the gas cap going bad, how about just buying a spare one and storing it with the spare tire? If you get a triangle of death that isn't obviously something else, try installing the spare gas cap. Easy way to save $130+ sometime in the future...