car diagnostics and fault readers

[MCKDAVID]

It can be a useful addition but one thing you need to 100% clear is that you are reading the codes for them and not diagnosing the fault..

that's a very good point, and one that needs to be defined for sure, as I've said, this wouldn't be a "replacement" for the garage, more an additional service at my end for clients, while I'm doing other jobs for them. Frankly I was surprised at the request initially, but I think I lot of people see the workshop activities and think it's "all the same".... I'm very unlikely to take on the car jobs for them, just more give them a technical idea of what they're or what they could be looking at .

 

[Turbo]

Given your location I would guess that you would see a lot of Peugeot's & Citroen's? You could do worse than getting a cloned copy of the Diagbox/PP2000/Lexia 3 software - it's the software that the PSA garages use. It will enable you to diagnose faults as well as all the other dealer only stuff like recoding new keys, etc.

I have one of the cheap ebay Chinese copies & it comes with all the necessary leads to connect to newer obd cars as well as older models. I wouldn't recommend the version I bought as the Chinglish installation instructions were useless & it took several attempts to get it installed correctly. Its also a bit buggy & will sometimes not load up or shut down properly and it will only work on windows xp. That being said it has enabled me to diagnose & fix a few faults on my 306 & has paid for itself several times over.

There's a company in the UK selling a version of this that is easier to use, with proper instructions & works on more modern windows versions. It costs quite a lot more than the ebay clones but you could justify it for business use.

 

[wacky7791]

I use one of those cheap ELM327 bluetooth things (about a fiver on ebay) which works OK on some cars for basic fault reading and clearing, works fine on my Holden colorado (isuzu dmax) and just use an app on the phone, nice and wireless but just reads codes and supplies some extra realtime info such as AIT temp, boost etc
for the A4 we have I use vagcom which is specific to VW/AUDI and is a laptop and cable affair but get much more detail and options with brand specific diagnostics software. with this you can change comfort settings etc

so basically get the one specific to your make, you'll get much more specific information and options. to me if you're gonna get a one size fits all it might as well be a cheap one as it'll never do everything anyway

 

[chris pruteanu]

Cheap tablet PC and a delphi interface and youre covered for pretty much 95 percent of european market ! All in wont cost you more tan 200 quid yet you can do regens and has live data- quite intuitive ! As mentioned above, you wont find a one size fitts all or under 1500 quid but for VAG group i use VCDS and delphi is my other go to diagnostic program. I run a garage in romania and i only found a toyota d4d with a denso ECU that i could not connect with so far !

 

[premmington]

Cheap tablet PC and a delphi interface and youre covered for pretty much 95 percent of european market ! All in wont cost you more tan 200 quid yet you can do regens and has live data- quite intuitive ! As mentioned above, you wont find a one size fitts all or under 1500 quid but for VAG group i use VCDS and delphi is my other go to diagnostic program. I run a garage in romania and i only found a toyota d4d with a denso ECU that i could not connect with so far !

We have here Genuine:

Delphi
Bosch KTS
VCDS Hex net
G scan (for japan korean stuff)
VDO Check

This will cover 99.9% of everything

But last week I still had a 2018 Jeep I could not get the service light off of it.

 

[earthman]

Do you need a full set of imperial spanners to be able to work on that Jeep? Lol

 

[earthman]

I've no idea about this ThinkDiag company and their device that's on kickstarter,....could be an option for many of us?

 

[Justme]

My ears hurt now.

 

[premmington]

My ears hurt now.

That comment made an old man laugh...