[ale] OT: check light diagnostic tool

[neal]

Without tending to provoke rabid disagreement, I use a ScanguageII on the truck and love it, and have used Torque on truck and Toyota Prius.   With both vehicles I've had check engine conditions where the ODBC code was nowhere close to the problem.   And the Dodge/Sprinter/Mercedes mechanic could show me data he could dig out with his tool that was not availble on ODBC.   

In my experience, one of the valuable and cheap steps was to leave the vehicle overnight, and then let them read all the sensors in the morning, to spot the looney.  




Sent from Samsung tablet"Michael B. Trausch" <mbt at naunetcorp.com> wrote:On 06/12/2013 11:49 AM, neal wrote:
If you need immediate results, as noted Autozone will do for free. 

If they have the time to help you.

Note that stock ODBC readers will NOT find all manufacturer data, at least for Toyota and Mercedes there is a wealth of data ODBC cannot access - only dealer computers can.     In many cases the DTC code is only an approximation of what is really going on.  You can experiment with crowd-sourcing your DTC code against what others have done to fix, but, unless it's cheap to try, you might be better off getting the dealer to read the real codes. 

All cars export their internal data to standardized codes.  Many shops use only the codes, because they have a standardized meaning.  The computers can often report far more than what has been standardized, so you have the same problem there that you do in the rest of the IT world: lack of standardization means difficulty for information interchange.

I assure you, however, that P0300 is clear enough to aid you in troubleshooting.  Hell, P0300 is a lot better than you'd get if you kept driving an older car only to possibly kill it.  :-)

Most OBDII codes aren't actually hard to translate into something to confirm (or often something to swap).  Another one that is very common is P0420, which has a very slim list of possible fixes.

OBDII also allows manufacturers to have vendor-specific codes; most codes you'll find that have meaning in terms of either performance     or emissions will be in the "P" category.  There are also B, C and U codes.  Each code type has a "manufacturer specific" range, where the code meanings are published by the vehicle manufacturer (e.g. Ford, GM).  Those codes, when received, are opaque until you find the right documentation, but I have yet to run into something outside of the category of relatively "easy" (discounting the difficulty of finding funds!) fixes, though I've only had to pay attention to my car for legal reasons since I moved here.  :-)  Before I moved here, I hardly worried about the MIL since my cars always had it on anyway.

    — Mike

-- 
	 Michael B. Trausch

President, Naunet Corporation
☎ (678) 287-0693 x130 or (888) 494-5810 x130

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