In message ,
Parish writes
It would have to be a half-witted back-street garage for them no to
have such diagnostic kit, this equipment is not dealer specific

Really? So if I took the Fiesta, or my Saab, to say a Vauxhall dealer
or (good, competent) independent that they'd be able to hook them up to
their diagnostic kit and extract as much info as the respective main
dealers?
Well, the dealers tend only to have their manufacturer's specific
equipment but a good independent will have a scantool (or scantools)
that can read and reset fault codes from many engine management systems
as well as displaying 'live' data with the engine running (coolant temp,
air temp, RPM injector pulse width, lambda sensor etc. etc...) to enable
fault finding.
I would have thought that the manufacturers would make their systems
(both in the car and the workshop) proprietary in order to (attempt to)
force people to use their dealers.
Cars after 2001 use E-OBDII, it's a standard that's Europe Wide and it
provides a mandatory minimum set of information, it's an available
protocol so it's 'easy' to use. Plenty of manufacturers add extra data
to the datastream, plenty don't or make it accessible to only their kit
but it's usually reverse engineered pretty quickly.

and
the fault codes are available to the trade.

Again, that surprises me - for the reasons stated above.

BTW, I'm not being sarcastic, I'd be interested to know.
Hopefully now you know.

Regards,

Parish


--
Clint Sharp