I spent the weekend swapping out my clutch. I have 120k miles on my 2006 Dakota. Besides replacing the shocks, the clutch is the only work done to the truck since I bought it ten years ago with 6k miles on it.

After bolting everthing back into place I went on a test drive. Everything appeared fine except the engine light. I double checked that everything was plugged in and verified that I didn't pinch any wires between the engine and transmission. Reset the codes and tried again.

Errors came back so I replaced the passenger side rear/lower O2 sensor. Cleared the codes and tried again. Still had both errors. That is when I noticed that the error codes were registering before I even turned the engine over.

So the question is, what would cause the O2 sensors to trigger as bad before the engine is even running? Any help would be much appreciated.

 

I think you're on the right track, sounds like an open circuit. You've double checked the wiring and connections. The older Dakotas had a fuse on the circuit, no idea if ours does.