I just brought my car in for an airbag light and inspection. They read the codes and stopped without charging me anything. They handed me the manufacturer printout of possibilities and future steps, and recommended I goto the dealer for a related recall. Of course the recall wasn’t enough so now I’m out thousands.
I know this is just one example but reading the codes myself would have made no difference. As far as I can remember out of all the problems with all the cars over the years, reading the codes would never have made the difference. I’m tempted because it’s cheap and knowledge is power, but realistically I don’t see it helping
Maybe this is directly related to how much work you can do on your own vehicle, when guided by a problem code, but I’ve never had a scenario where this was even close
If by actually help you mean does it ever fix things? No, an OBD reader will never fix a problem, it is just a diagnostic tool, it helps locating a problem without having to essentially do a full body scan by hand, kinda as if you had a leak in a house, and instead of having to inspect every pipe in the house tearing down walls, you just use a tool that tells you “leak found, upstairs shower, hot side valve”, yes you still could have found the leak just by hand if you wanted, but it might have taken days or weeks, and tons of money replacing unnecessary pipes.
Its good you have a shop that did the OBD readout and gave you suggestions for free, most shops around me you’ll be paying hundreds for that, but I agree it still suck regardless that you are down a path that is gonna cost thousands, for what it is worth, if you have an airbag/SRS problem, an OBD reader definitely wouldn’t help as anything SRS is always really expensive, usually not just a case of plug and play parts, even just a broken wire isn’t just a simple soldering job and hardware adaptions very much are vehicle specific and can be timely if calibration is necessary
But does it actually help?
I just brought my car in for an airbag light and inspection. They read the codes and stopped without charging me anything. They handed me the manufacturer printout of possibilities and future steps, and recommended I goto the dealer for a related recall. Of course the recall wasn’t enough so now I’m out thousands.
I know this is just one example but reading the codes myself would have made no difference. As far as I can remember out of all the problems with all the cars over the years, reading the codes would never have made the difference. I’m tempted because it’s cheap and knowledge is power, but realistically I don’t see it helping
Maybe this is directly related to how much work you can do on your own vehicle, when guided by a problem code, but I’ve never had a scenario where this was even close
If by actually help you mean does it ever fix things? No, an OBD reader will never fix a problem, it is just a diagnostic tool, it helps locating a problem without having to essentially do a full body scan by hand, kinda as if you had a leak in a house, and instead of having to inspect every pipe in the house tearing down walls, you just use a tool that tells you “leak found, upstairs shower, hot side valve”, yes you still could have found the leak just by hand if you wanted, but it might have taken days or weeks, and tons of money replacing unnecessary pipes.
Its good you have a shop that did the OBD readout and gave you suggestions for free, most shops around me you’ll be paying hundreds for that, but I agree it still suck regardless that you are down a path that is gonna cost thousands, for what it is worth, if you have an airbag/SRS problem, an OBD reader definitely wouldn’t help as anything SRS is always really expensive, usually not just a case of plug and play parts, even just a broken wire isn’t just a simple soldering job and hardware adaptions very much are vehicle specific and can be timely if calibration is necessary