Of course this is not going to tell you about bad CVs or a blown heater core, or mirrors that do not work, because those failures do not show up in the OBD codes on the car in the first place. Its not going to tell you if your phone’s battery is low either! It tells you about conditions that cause a “check engine” light to come on. Duh!

However, we have used this on several cars where the Check Engine light did come on, and we were able to get a reasonable readout of what might be wrong, and using their CarMD database, get a reasonably good report of what the repair might be.

When my wife took the car into the first mechanic for an estimate, he tried to bluff her with a bunch of BS and charge us for things that had NOTHING to do with the error codes in the OBD, and we knew what he was saying was just BS, and she did not use him. The next mechanic suggested things that this report also suggested. That alone saved us some money.

On my Toyota, the check engine light came on, I got the codes, and CarMD suggested a bad gas cap. I bought a new one, and the next day, off when the light. That saved me money from not going to the mechanic to see what was wrong. Where are you going to find that on Google?

We also plugged it into a used car a friend of mine was thinking of buying. It reported a number of errors, including some valve timing issues indicating a possibly bad timing belt, a possible bad head gasket (vacuum leak), and two other critical codes. Seems that the check engine light in this car had been disconnected. Without this, we probably would have never noticed it missing in the array of lights that flash when you start the car. Saved him a load of headaches.

As for using Google, again you are wrong. Sure, you can find some info if you do enough searching, but these guys have an amazing database of codes and reported service problems that were found with those codes by a network of repair shops that report codes/repairs. They continue to collect that info, and this is stuff that is NOT in any Google searchable database. Besides, I am not sure what your time is worth, but the few minutes this took me to diagnose and print a reasonable report was MUCH shorter than I suspect anything you might try reading the raw codes and spending hours on Google. Good luck with that.

Come on, man: do you think this will tell you about bad CVs? A blown heater core? Electric mirrors that don’t work?

Look code scanners up on NAPA. Thirty bucks, name your brand. None of them will tell amateurs what those codes mean, either, but Google might give them a fighting chance, and really, a good independent mechanic will tell them the same thing.