Modern cars have MASSIVE digital displays, loads of computers systems monitoring every subsystem and internal diagnostics running to the OBDII ports.
Why the hell can’t we get diagnostic feeds on our console or infotainment center?
I’m not aware of any car manufacturers selling their own diagnostic ASICs, so it’s not an extra margin to squeeze afaik…
What gives? Any insight into this beyond the usual muh corporate profits conjecture?
The sad answer is that those displays exist to cut costs, not to make your ownership experience better.
Also the dealers want you to come to them for that CEL, and the companies don’t want to piss off the dealers.
They make the ownership experience worse. I fucking hate mine.
I wish I could replace half of the real estate with buttons and.knobs but nooooo, I can’t afford a car with such fancy craftsmanship so it’s a cheap shitty screen with a cheap shitty OS instead. And everyone things it’s fancy…LOL
I like my Infiniti because it has both a screen and knobs / buttons
As does my ram
Just to throw this out there, but car dealership owners are close to the scummiest people on the planet.
They don’t call them Stealerships for nothing.
Yes
My spouse used to work in the industry. I can confirm your take with first hand experience 😮💨
Why don’t the companies want to piss off the dealers? Is some Toyota dealership really gonna stop selling Toyotas because a Toyota comes out with a self-diagnosis feature?
The dealers have a shocking amount of power in the US
Dealerships do a lot of absorption of supply and demand elasticity on behalf of the manufacturer. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
There is a standard connector which existed before big screens landed in cars, the OBD2 connector. Dongles are cheap and you can read the output from your phone or computer. Some dongles support bluetooth. The connector is mandated in some markets and I guess that makes it less interesting to add a redundant interface inside of the car. It’s fun to try if you’re interested. Manufacturers can extend the error codes IIRC.
Tesla has a service mode on the display through which you can scan the car for faults, run a battery test, … It is password protected but the password is publicly available.
Usually I wouldn’t be that guy, but it’s OBD2, not ODB2.
OBD - On Board Diagnostics
Updated my comment to reflect this. Thanks for clearing out the confusion.
Once it may have been called ALDL instead. My '95 Commodore has one. Assembly Line Diagnostic Link. Same physical connector.
ALDL was proprietary to GM kind of like apple and their connector tomfoolery. In 1990-something CARB probably didn’t want to buy all the different diagnostic tools so they said if you want to drive in California your car needs OBD-II. Now, I can check and clear codes on any modern car with a $35 tool.
1996 model year.
deleted by creator
Bingo! You can get a BT adapter for $7 on eBay. Torque is the absolute killer app. I’m stunned something so complete and customizable is free, a few bucks for the full version. I suck at mechanics, but that has saved my butt a time or two.
If you own a car that was made in the last several decades, it has the OBDII connector under the steering wheel and openly accessible. You just plug the adapter in and connect to your phone. The adapter and app are every bit as important to me as a jack, lug wrench and tire pump. No one should be without for a measly $20.
My wife’s car occasionally throws an error that kills the cruise control. She can clear the error code while I’m driving! If you have ever had a mysterious check engine light, you can see exactly what it means.
Torque is ancient and not supported on current versions of Android.
I’ve been using Piston for a long time and I’ve been happy with it
This is totally it. Car is already required to support OBDII, adding the ability to display diagnostic info to the screen costs more.
Yeah, particularly it costs more, which you would need customers to want to pay for. If those same customers can just get an OBD-2 connector for a fraction of the upcharge, that’s not gonna work out…
They want you going to the dealer, so they can upsell more maintenance and repair costs.
Money
I don’t know if that’s the reason but it probably is
I’m guessing government regulation.
This feature is a no-brainer. Whenever there’s a feature the market would love (and hence pay for) the reason it isn’t there is the government doesn’t allow it.
I’m not aware of any car manufacturers selling their own diagnostic ASICs, so it’s not an extra margin to squeeze afaik…
What? The errors are intentionally vague so the drivers are forced to go to a dealer, giving them a chance to lie and pretend that’s something very serious and very expensive, while all they’re going to do is a reseat of a cable and a error reset
Btw Car scanner supports showing obd data on Android auto. It’s a game changer for hypermilers
They probably don’t want YOU to be the one diagnosing.
Yo it’d be sick af to root your cars dash and load some OS onto it and have your own console!
ODB2 into a raspberry pi or a breadboard somehow, get some sick diagnostics application whipped up.
Here’s to projects I’ll never tackle.
I had an old Android tablet running Torque in my dash where the radio used to be. Adapter and phone app, $20.
I have a couple of those OBDongles that pair over BT, honestly the interface leaves a lot to be desired.
Hondas infotainment is just android. And at least on my friends 2017 Civic you could get to the regular ass android interface. Most of them are some flavor of Linux.
Also you can install whatever head unit you want on most cars. You can even buy a head unit from china that will match your cars trim for like $300 from china.
I admire your creativity!
Cheers
P r o f I t
Correct, but in the opposite way. Teslas have a service mode and Tesla is the most valuable car manufacturer.
I don’t care what features my China-Mobile has, I’m not supporting China’s Lithium, Cobalt, or working conditions.
I use a Veepeak OBDII reader, and run Car Scanner on my phone or a tablet to access that data. And yeah, it would be nifty if I didn’t have to add one or more additional screens to do that. It’s cumbersome.
Because FUCK YOU. That’s why.
Car companies want you to go back to the dealership to have codes read. They had to be sued into releasing the code’s meanings so independent shops and owners could do their own repairs.
Even though most car owners are knuckle draggers who don’t understand oil changes or air filter changes, they don’t want to make it any easier to do repairs outside of dealerships. I know someone who swears by dealerships and was very confused when I asked if he ever changed the air filter to improve fuel economy. For some reason, he thought his car didn’t have one.
“Fuck you. Give us money” - BMW (probably)
No, you’re thinking of Mercedes, this is BMW so you have to buy the ‘fuck you’ subscription, just a monthly 15€, to get that amount of response from them.
That subscription is only available for customers who have bought the “car seat heat ON”, “car seat heat OFF”, “AC direction control with an optional AC temperature control upgrade”, AND the “rear mirror defrost” subscriptions … as well as having less than 20000km on the odometer, past 20k km the subscription is 20€ and requires the “advanced oil leak detection system” subscription (it’s just a light on the dash to remind you to casually look where you parked for oil spots)
Fuck BMW, let me have an Opel Kadett instead
Some cars do! Mine shows diagnostic info for the can bus and GPS by holding down a “secret” button combination. I’m sure other manufacturers do that too.
I can’t even get my manufacturer to give me a fuse box diagram… what make do you drive if you don’t mind me being nosy?
2004 Honda Accord Coupe. Yup, screens even back then. (On the fancy models)
It’s… a trooper. First thing I did after I bought the car was purchase the service manuals for $400. It’s so easy to maintain.
I looked that up for my partners newer car. Annual subscription to a service manuals is $1500+.
Who is going to look at that stuff apart from technicians? Most users have no clue how the functionality of their vehicle is achieved and they don’t care.
For argument’s sake, let’s assume there is a userbase for this type of information. It would be possible to show diagnostic information like DTC or run DID routines from the dashboard but this is already possible from any cheap offboard tester, via a phone app or laptop.
The reality is that even if an OEM wanted to provide detailed diagnostic information, they don’t know it either because the information isn’t disclosed by their supply chain. Companies such as Bosch, who supply brake ECU, are extremely tight lipped about their intellectual property. When something goes wrong we use a special development version of the ECU to record the associated software variables during the fault and present that as evidence but we don’t have access to the source code.
Modern products are not designed to be repaired. They want us to continually buy new shit. Basically anything with software in it is an absolute nightmare to maintain. It makes me depressed just thinking about what a clusterfuck this landscape is.
Source: control system engineer for a large OEM.
Why don’t all computers have everything digital ever made? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity
As someone pointed out on the comment, one of the reason is Money, the other one is safety and security
based on Vehicle manufacturer claim.Yet, nobody can stop you to sniff and monitor your own car CAN/OBD2 interface using as simple as cheap microcontroller and compatible OBD2 interface kit (e.g CAN Transceiver/Controller kit).
EDIT: So far this curated list helpful to me for CAN bus based protocol.
They want you to go to the dealership…
The only reason you can read the codes at all is because of regulation… For now thanks Trump
