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?
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)
Ironically, BMWs do or at least used to, have diagnostic functionality in their infotainment centers. It wouldn’t go very deep, but it was more informative than “lol engine bad visit workshop”. It’d still tell you to visit the workshop, but it’d also tell you why.
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
If they wanted you to have that info, the software that powers the code reader would already be in the cars computer and would show human readable errors.
They don’t
Why don’t all computers have everything digital ever made? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity
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
Surprisingly, Teslas actually do. You have to access a hidden menu, but it’s well documented and easy to do.
Until you fail to pay your subscription fee and Elmo autopilots you off a cliff.
Car manufacturers aren’t required to document how to repair “infotainment centers” because they aren’t critical to the operation of a car. Making them more useful might require a car manufacturer to spend more money by allowing more requirements to be imposed upon them.
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
Nice! I’m glad other brands are still sane. Nissan is moving towards all-screen and I think that’s my cue to leave them.
Iirc there was a push on manufacturers from the NHTSA to return to physical controls for things like HVAC and media due to safety concerns, but I don’t know how official that was.
Just to throw this out there, but car dealership owners are close to the scummiest people on the planet.
Yes
They don’t call them Stealerships for nothing.
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?
Dealerships do a lot of absorption of supply and demand elasticity on behalf of the manufacturer. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
The dealers have a shocking amount of power in the US
And most of their money comes from parts and service.
We could have had readable diagnostics since they started showing multiple items on the in-dash LCDs. It’s always money.
Even OBD1 cars had that in the form of a blinking check engine light.
Shit, it works for my furnace 😅
Our 85 Thunderbird used to blink a set of numbers out. But you still had to have some type of information to make use of it
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.
Who is going to look at that stuff apart from technicians?
Anyone who owns expensive equipment and is serious about true ownership including all possible maintenance and repairs. Hi, I’m the guy who would be looking at it if it was visible without shitty dongles or 5-figure ASICs.
Tell your employer they could have share prices doing numbers if they did the slightest bit of QOL improvements for anyone remotely like me.
Pleased to meet you. I am also one of those people. We’re a rare breed 😂
I mean, I don’t think they’re taking about a full diagnostic. Just the code associated with a CEL.
It’d be nice if you could read the code from the dashboard or infotainment without digging out a code reader.
And it’d be even better if they had human readable descriptions for those codes, especially for OEM specific codes.For most people, a CEL is all you really need. But sometimes and for some people, just telling them the problem would be super helpful.
For example, a loose gas cap is a CEL. Save people $100 at the mechanic if it was just like “check that your gas cap is tight”When I’ve queried DTC using a cheap scan tool it’s usually resolved the important (as in emission relevant) DTC information text and most of the non engine stuff. In order to create a DTC there usually is a customer recognisable fault or an implication for emissions performance.
Many of the DTC are spurious and would only serve to confuse the user. As a system integrator, I’m personally responsible for creating tens of thousands of spurious DTC (in a vehicle population of ~100k) and I have to periodically report to management what has been done to reduce that number. The funny bit is when I found the root cause the management completely lost interest in solving the problem because, money 😂
I’m with you though, there’s no such thing as too much information. I want to know how my car is doing and fix the problems. Most people in the business do not care and our users are ignorant and apathetic, that’s why we can’t have nice things.
I mostly just meant “if you’re gonna send up a CEL, then tell the customer what the CEL is without going to the mechanic, especially if there is a potentially trivial cause”
But yeah I get that OEMs just don’t wanna. Capitalism is gonna capitalism.
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.
It’s almost always the reverse.
Regulation is what forced manufacturers to provide standard error codes over a standard protocol using a standard socket, so that people could self diagnose their car problems without getting locked into their dealership mechanic
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.
Interesting fact. OBDII is a CARB requirement, so it’s tied to cars that must meet emissions standards. This is why Teslas don’t need to include one (ands it likely other manufacturers will stop including them in their electric models at some point as well). No emissions systems to check means no need for an OBDII port.
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.
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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
Yeah that’s what it said for me when I clicked that playstore link. Apparently my 4 year old phone is too new to use the app.
What I’ve learned with 15 years in the DIY repair sphere is that (obviously to me) the codes don’t tell you what’s at fault, only what’s not reading correctly and (to my surprise) the general public will just replace what the code says is off. A MAF code doesn’t tell you if it’s the sensor, the wiring, or the PCM.
While I’d certainly appreciate a simple code readout because I’m pretty knowledgeable about which are actually concerning this moment vs this year vs never, diagnosis typically takes more equipment and time. The cost and hassle of the reader is negligible in the repair. I use a Bluetooth dongle and Torque app to read all kinds of stats when diagnosing. An integrated interface would be convenient in some ways, but the portability of a phone/tablet probably has an equal amount of convenience once hard diag is needed
Teslas do. https://youtu.be/fVWfmvgDtaY
As other mentioned cheap ODB2 readers, but some brands offer a lot of diagnostic data over the infotainment system, they just won’t display them to you - for BMW I use AAIdrive (is foss, github/AAIdrive) and it displays some of the data on the main screen without a physical ODB2 reader inserted.
(And ofc custom navigation, VLC, etc)I am going to spend my holiday break looking into this, thank you very much!
They probably don’t want YOU to be the one diagnosing.
