Lots of folks complain these days that cars are no more than computers on wheels. The benefit though, is that you can tap into all that data that was never available before.
Since 1996, all cars have come with OBD-II, that stand for On-board diagnostics, and it’s a standardized gateway into your car’s computer.
In order to get to that information, you’re gonna need a reader, like this, that scans for the data that’s in a computer. These used to be really expensive, but they’ve come down in price. And they’re pretty easy to use, and we’ll show you.
First step to getting into the computer, is to plug into the port that’s under the dash.
Most of the time you’ll fund right by where your knees are. This one is hidden pretty deep. So I’ll plug it in. Powering this one up, you just press the button like this. This one is externally powered not all of them are. Some of them run on the vehicle power, so you’ll have to key it on.
This one I can configure to get the Manufacturers codes as well which is a little bit different than the standard OBD-II codes. At this point in order to pull the data out of the computer, we have to key the vehicle on. So we’re going to do that. The check engine light on this car is on so we are gonna now scan the car find out what the problem is.
Press scan here follow the directions on the screen. And now it’s talking it’s a really easy process, so you just wait for the computer to do its work. So now it’s talking to us and telling us what’s wrong. And now the scan has been successful and we can go on and figure everything out now.
All this scanners are different. This one is a little bit more complicated than the normal. But it’s got a variety of selections here in this main menu. We’re gonna get the trouble cod,e so we’ll go down and select frame number three and get the trouble codes. And it tells us that we’ve got exhaust gas recirculation flow insufficient.
The system too lean, that means our oxygen sensors on the engine are reading too lean, same with the others side of the engine. So that tells us we’ve got a little bit of an issue with the way that fuel system is detecting or the way that it’s working. So generally, all this codes have the same meaning across all brands.
But if you wanna get a good read on exactly what’s going on with your car it’s probably best these days to take this code along with your make and model and actually do an Internet search, it’ll point you in the right direction. And really that’s the best things that this pulling codes can do for you.
Whenever you pull code like the Oxygen Sensor is filling don’t just throw an oxygen sensor on. It might be parts upstream. It might be totally unrelated to that. It takes a little bit detective work in testing. So this things used to be wildly expensive but they come down in price a lot.
You can actually go rent them at your auto parts store. But they’re so simple and so easy to use. Everybody should probably get a little bit more familiar with them. At least if you are a car guy. Custom made scan tools like this one used to be the only way to do this job. Now they make apps for it.
This is really cool. It’s a cable that plugs your car’s computer into your phone. So just like with the scanner, you plug it into the OBD-II port, then plug this into your phone. Now you can launch the app. Now that you’ve got your phone hooked up, you can clear lights, you can check out what’s wrong with your car.
Or let’s say you’ve got something silly, like the gas cap is loose. That’ll throw a code, you can find it here, go fix it. Clear the code in here, and it’ll turn off the check engine light, you’ll be back on the road and it was a simple fix. The thing you can’t do. those of you who live in emissions regulation states is just clear the lights and go through rear test and think you can cheat by they’ll know and you’ll get busted.
So the cool thing about the smart phone system is that A, you can’t mess up the car. You can’t mess up the car with OBD-II at all. You’re reading codes. B, You can do all kinds of really powerful stuff. You can log data you can watch the engine performances as it’s going. Heck they even got a Bluetooth dongle so you can always have this thing hooked up to the car.
If you’re a car geek, this is really the way to go. If you have any questions about this job, leave them in the comment section, or shoot me an email. We’ll try to set them up in a video chat.