Edit: This is for a 2001 V6 Camry...

Long story short, a relative of mine who is on leave from the military left his car with his mom for a year. She is elsewhere in the country and plans to drive the car to where he is, about 2000 miles away. Being somewhat irresponsible, she did not properly prepare the car ahead of this journey, and only now discovered that it is throwing codes P0300, P0446 and P0500. I believe P0500 has to do with the speedometer not working, and P0446 is an evaporative emissions item. Neither of these really concern me. P0300 on the other hand (engine misfire if I recall) does concern me.

Does she risk permanent engine damage if she drives this great distance with the car throwing those codes, particularly the P0300?

Unfortunately neither she nor anyone she's associated with can really be trusted to perform any repairs on it, and she's not in much monetary position to do anything either, so we may have no choice, but regardless I am wondering what to expect if she goes ahead and drives it without doing anything. Thanks in advance.

Misfire (P0300) may overheat the cat converter. This is potentially a safety issue around combustibles and should be addressed.

^ What Brian said. The P0300 code is a random missfire code. The unburned fuel from the missfiring cylinder(s) travels out the exhaust valves of that cylinder or cylinders and through the exhaust system. That includes the converter. The converter is made to deal with the unburned hydrocarbons from a normally functioning cylinder, not the hydrocarbons from raw gasoline from a missifring cylinder or cylinders. Even if it doesn't overheat the converter, it may destroy it, or at the very least greatly shorten it's life. If she were to have to drive the car about 50 miles I would say give it a try; but not 2000 miles. That's just asking for trouble. I would at least deal with the problem causing that code before venturing out on a 2000 miles journey. At home she can ask friends or relatives to recommend a tech they trust and bring the car to that tech.

Mike

Thanks for the replies. I will certainly warn her about the possible consequences before she leaves. (Unfortunately I can't count on anything being done, but at least I'll be a little prepared for the consequences to follow.)

Well, my cousin's 2001 Camry made it the 2000 mile journey without incident despite throwing a P0300, P0446 and P0500. (No, it was not ideal for it to happen that way, but it was beyond my control...)

Today I discovered and fixed a frayed wire going to the vehicle speed sensor, and lo and behold the speedometer and odometer immediately began working again. :biggrin: I hope that that at least takes care of the P0500.

I also discovered that an air line going to a nipple on the underside of the airbox was disconnected. This line goes to a little valve that sits right next to the airbox, between it and the driver (I'm assuming it's a valve) that seems to then lead to a solid fuel line. I'm assuming this is the evap valve and I'm hopeful that the fact that the air hose being disconnected might have caused the P0446 and that I won't have to do anything else for that one.

I will have the codes pulled again as soon as I can, but I wanted to ask whether either the vehicle speed sensor's frayed wire or the evap valve's disconnected airline could ever possibly cause a P0300, or is that just wishful thinking? :confused: I'm guessing it's wishful thinking...

Finally, I noticed the tranny doing something weird very occasionally. You'll pull away from a stop light and around 20mph you'll continue to step on the gas and the RPMs will go up but the car will act like it's in neutral for a moment. This only happened once and I couldn't reproduce it, but my cousin reported this happening to him as well. Could this possibly be related to the speed sensor or is the tranny developing a separate issue? Trans fluid is present and looks fine.

Thanks in advance for any info!

OKAY well I just got a call from him telling me the CEL turned itself off and he went to autozone and they checked it for codes and there were no longer any present. So apparently I did something right. Nevermind!

Good job!

Combined threads.