Help!! OBD-II not communicating for emissions test

Try a different stall at the test station. It may just be a weird glitch.

 

or try a whole nuther inspection place. if his reader worked, the state machine should have. i doubt it's your car.

 

Find someone with a OBD2 tester thingy and plug it in, check if it powers up the OBD2 device and retrieve display real time values. If it powers up and populate data, the smog place machine had a hiccup and smog it elsewhere.

Hope those smog people place were polite to you when it didn't communicate, the ones I run into here are rude and accuse me to pull the battery terminal when it doesn't pass.

 

I agree with the advice to try another inspection station. OBD II can use any of several electrical interfaces, which use different pins of the connector, so even something as simple as a broken wire in the stations’s test cable could cause the equipment to work with some vehicles and not with others.

Massachusetts is also in the process of starting a new inspection program, and if your car was tested with one of the old machines, you might try again after October 1, if you can wait that long.

If the test fails at a second station, you should check if your car has any coverage remaining under Toyota’s California Emission Control Warranty, which also applies in states like Massachusetts that have adopted the California requirements, as long as the car has a California or 50-state emission control system (most do, but check the certification label under the hood). As the Warranty and Maintenance Guide (PDF) says, subject to certain exclusions:

For 15 years or 150,000 miles, whichever occurs first:

• If your vehicle fails a smog-check test, all necessary repairs and adjustments will be made by Toyota to ensure that your vehicle passes the test. This is your Emission Control System PERFORMANCE WARRANTY.
• Subject to the specific terms pertaining to maintenance described on the following pages, if any emissions-related part is defective, the part will be repaired or replaced by Toyota. This is your Emission Control System DEFECT WARRANTY.

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If you take your car to a Toyota dealer (be sure to bring a written report of the test failure), they’ll try connecting to it with a Toyota Techstream diagnostic system. If they can reproduce the problem this way, there are Repair Manual procedures to fix it, but otherwise, they may have to open a case with Toyota's Technical Assistance System (TAS), the dealer-only support line.

Definitive troubleshooting might require access to the state-approved inspection equipment, an oscilloscope with CAN bus decoding capability, back probes for the DLC3 connector, and copies of the SAE J1962 and ISO 15765-4 standards—but none of this should be your responsibility.

 

congrats!