Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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Why don't cars have diagnostic software loaded onto their infotainment centers? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

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.