Weird wideband oxygen sensor behavior

Hi,

I am seeing some weird wideband O2 sensor behavior so I thought I would post up here and see if anyone has any comments to help explain.

The VCM scanner attachments are from the same street run today and only a few minutes apart. The one attachment sees the O2 sensor capturing readings as I would expect then the second attachment sees the O2 sensor seemingly freak out.

Thoughts?

David

Perhaps I need to recalibrate my O2 sensor? I installed the O2 sensor (Innovate LC-2) new back in July 2024 and then stored the car from December 2024 to April 2025

Since it looks like it happens at high RPM & load -- perhaps the sensor is overheating? Since the sensors themselves are a wear item, I always have the next one in stock, so I can swap it in to see if there is a sensor issue, or wideband / communicaiton issue. BTW, if not a sensor issue, I put the original sensor back in, so my new one stays new...

Pretty common with Innovate controllers due to the way they control the sensor. This is the famous "E8" timing error, they will blame excessive temperature or the sensor, but it is really just because they are using a measurement technique that the sensor was never designed for.

You will get much better reliability and sensor life from a controller that uses a more traditional pump current measurement. AEM X-series is a reasonable option at a similar price point that will work with VCM.

Ugh, really? I bought the innovate last summer because it seemed to be the one that the HP Academy teachers were always using and talking about. I even went to all the trouble to run and install all the wiring and controller inconspicuously.

I think I will log a customer service call to HP Academy to see what they have to say about this.

Thanks

Hi David, I've just got up to speed over this with Taz and apologise on the slow reply as I've just been overseas for a couple of weeks. There's a few points to this that I'll add to give a full picture of the situation. Obviously we can only offer our own experience with different products and I am aware that many people have had issues with the LM2 however that simply hasn't been my experience and it's still a product that I use for road testing vehicles that don't have built in wideband controllers.

The LC2 seems to be more problematic than the LM2 in fairness and I had some issues with their earlier controllers. I can't quite remember the specifics but if my memory serves correct, I believe the one we tested in our 86 for 6 months or so was a second generation controller. I went into that test slightly sceptical due to the issues I'd seen with the earlier controller but we ran that in the car for around 6 months as a long term test and logged both the LC2 and the MoTeC LTC and found a near perfect correlation and zero issues over the test period. All that being said, this was also 10 years ago and technology has moved on, particularly with respect to CAN-based controllers that eliminate the potential ground offset and calibration problems that can be an issue with analogue voltage based controllers. It's fair to say there are superior products on the market these days that I would recommend for your specific application - The AEM X series in particular is a perfect match for HP Tuners as it provides data via CAN and uses an OBD2 pass-through connector to get the data into the scanner so on that front it literally couldn't be simpler.

This is a tricky situation however as we obviously can't cover every potential combination of vehicle and tuning solution and what is right, wrong, or the best option in each instance. In your case there is a very obvious winner in the AEM X-Series for the reasons discussed above, but even that product isn't one that I'd use in every application so it's not a black and white answer as to 'which wideband is the best?'.