Excess oil, gas or a other exhaust problems such as a leak or block flow can ruin a cat.
How do you know is a bad cat? CEL on? A lot of shops just say...Bad Cat, without looking into it.
How much oil are you adding per X thousand miles. Do you have any visible oil leaks? If not an you are burning oil then check PCV. Carefully read this.
http://www.tegger.com/hondafaq/pcv-repla...
Replace or not. Depends on how much oil you are losing. If a lot then you have to fix that first.
Excess oil use will make a Cat go bad quicker than normal, but wont kill it instantly unless you have a smoke screen behind you.
Is the car in otherwise good condtion? If it is, then fixing it is an option, and it might go for another 5 years if you don't do a lot of miles. If it's giving all sorts of other little maintenance issues as well, might be time to update.
The bad catalyst issue won't go away unless you fix the root of the problem.
fix the oil burning problem first then the cat ill survive..
My 02 Civic with over 200k miles has a bad cat. I have to add oil between oil changes and i read online that an engine burning oil can cause a cat to go bad. Is it worth fixing or will it just happen again?
