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Automakers Try To Keep Repair Codes Secret
An anonymous reader writes "Can't get the trouble codes out of your car's computer? Congress wants to help. I think it's odd that they think it's your God-given right to reverse-engineer your car, but not your XBox. Why aren't the automakers bashing these third-party code readers over the head with the DMCA while they still can?" This debate has been going on for several years.
I think it's odd that they think it's your God-given right to reverse-engineer your car, but not your XBox
Simple, a badly maintained car can cause death. A badly maintained Xbox will cost you $99 for a new one. Anyone else spotting the difference here? They arent helping YOU, they are helping the independant garages to keep your car in good shape and help prevent a fatality or two.
Congress allowing reverse engineering of repair codes will allow third party diagnostics systems available at prices the independant can truely afford to pay. This makes them better at maintaining vehicles.
"Why aren't the automakers bashing these third-party code readers over the head with the DMCA while they still can?"
Because the DMCA protects copyrighted information that is protected by some sort of security system (although the system is often lame). These auto codes are not protected by any security, besides obscurity.
The Technonaut
Most common use for modchips: pirating games (illegal)
Most common use for car codes: fixing your car (legal - but most likely won't be possible with future cars)
The similarity is that game makers make less money if you pirate a game (instead of buying it). Car dealers/manufacturers make less money if you fix your own car (and down pay for their overpriced service and "genuine rippof parts").
Casual Games/Downloads
First off, when purchasing a "cheap" car, you get what you pay for. Most of the commercials you see on TV for Kia, Hyundai's and offer the 10-year warranty are crap for this exact reason. The car, a 2002 model is still covered under the manufactuers warranty, however, there's some stipulations. In short, it doesn't cover "user error". Here's a college student who has had the car serviced 12 times for the same problem, and each time told the same thing. Depending on where she lives, she may need to check into her state's lemon law.
I help admin a Mazda 6 enthusiast site and have never heard of anything like this before regarding warranty problems. Any check engine light, whether the drivers fault or not is taken care of without a charge. Paying a $120 fee each time it gets services is ridiculous! Again, just another use to show you the hooks and gimmicks of buying "cheaper" cars thinking that a 10-year warranty will keep you safe from any problems. Our group was lucky. With the help of Mazda service mangers around the US, we were able to get a complete list of trouble codes posted. As was stated in the article the AutoXRay is a wonderful tool to help. It is fairly pricey, but if you have no other way of determining the problem, this would really help and saves on having the repair shop diagnose the problem for you. Instead alll it takes is this scanner to read the codes, determine the problem, and have them fix it. From the article...
"Bryan Hanks, who has taken his 2002 Toyota Prius to his local Houston dealership four times since a single sensor malfunctioned and the Check Engine signal prevented him from using the car's electronic display, said automakers should incorporate USB ports in dashboards to allow consumers to download error messages to a laptop."
Any legitimate scanner will allow you to also download a freeze frame and trouble codes to your laptop or monitor real-time data that may not be available to you through dashboard guages.
IMHO, if after 12 times, I think common sense has to play a big part in the determination process of what's going on. With the advent of cars having tons of microprocessors and computers on-board to control everything from real-time air/fuel ratios to your cabin temperature settings it's no wonder why CEL codes will light up for inane reasons, the gas cap one being the most common. When the reason shows up on the diagnostic computer it most likely shows a fuel leak (depending on car manufactuer). Out of perspective, it seems like a pretty serious problem. However, once all of the fuel lines have been pressure checked and show no leaks, the only problem could be with a loose gas cap. This can go 2 ways.. either she is taking it to the dumbest dealership service department or she is a complete twit herself.
Hmmm.
They are creating competition... If more service shops have these "codes" they are able to offer a better price than the dealership. This gives the consumer the choice of taking it there, having to pay less but also have less-experience machanics (for that particular model perhaps) work, or pay a slightly higher price and have the dealership do it. It creates a choice for the consumer rather than telling them they MUST go to the dealership to get it fixed.
Hmmm.
This does provide an opportunity to educate Congress by showing them that the needs of both professions with respect the DMCA (and other horrors) are basically very similar at heart.
This is a little bit off-topic, but one reason why young folks buy Kia's and Hyundais is because of the extra-long warranty period, 10 years, I think. A quote from the article helps me to realize that Kia's warranty is probably fraught with small-print and legalese that helps them to cover their butts with their decade-long warranty.
"Instead of explaining anything to me they just pull out a warranty sheet with a highlighted portion indicating that they don't cover Check Engine light problems."
They don't cover check engine light problems? I can see, on one hand, why they wouldn't do this (money-wise), but on the other, it's not very nice to offer someone what is evidentally perceived to be a blanket warranty for the whole car and then charge for small repairs. I think that Kia and other similar, low-cost automakers should be more forthcoming in their commercials about their warranties.
I know that many cars already come with OBD II compliant ports (http://www.obdii.com/) and there are interfaces out there to hook your laptop to the OBD port and check the engine management software. Indeed there are tools to remap the engine software that use the same OBD port (I've installed this on my BMW)
Given that this type of standardized interface exists, and that tools for "exploiting" it are readily available and fairly cheap, I don't see how it would be possible to keep this information (error codes and the like) secret.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Or her car-savvy son could do it for free.
Of course, if she had a car-savvy son he'd probably have talked her out of buying a Kia.
It was before the lemon laws. The problem was that the car would just quit, right in the middle of driving down the interstate or wherever. After a few minutes you could restart it. After the third trip to the dealership failed to find the problem, I "revoked my acceptance" of the product, just like it was a bad hair drier I took back to Walmart. The dealer sputtered and argued for a while, but I got my money back and took it down the road and bought a different brand. It didn't take me 12 tries.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
... you just have to pay for it. One place you can get this sort of stuff, off the top of my head, is ALLDATA. There's many others, I'm sure.
The info is out there and many of the car companies do indeed offer it. They just don't much advertise it. They're too busy making cars to be selling information about them. Don't chalk this up to malice so fast, is what I'm saying. Mark it down as stupidity instead. It seems more likely.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This is "insightful"? I see a lot of sophmoric profanity, but no insight. Or does sufficient profanity equate to insight these days? I wonder if the poster even bothered to read the rest of the article. In case he didn't...
Just because the check engine light indicated a loose gas cap one time, or even several times, that doesn't mean that the next time means the same thing. It might mean something serious. There is no way for Ms. Seymour to tell. Nor is there anyway for 3rd partly mechanics to tell. That was sort of the whole point of the article.
They used to be. A family friend who turns wrenches for the local Chrysler dealer was telling us that now they hook the car up to the computer, it sends the trouble code data to detroit, and an "engineer" in detroit sends the fix back to the dealership. They don't even release the codes to the local mechanics, as they would rather not have a mechanic open his own shop with the codes.
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
Simple, a badly maintained car can cause death. A badly maintained Xbox will cost you $99
It probably has more to do with the number of Congressmen who own a car versus the number who own an XBox.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Go to Autozone. The nice man there has a code reader, and will read the code, for free, and tell you what it means. Of course he wants you to buy some parts to fix it, but you don't have to.
Alternatively, you can look it up here Input your car model and year, and the specific code.
More likely, she'd be able to get the same service at a non-dealer shop for a lot less than $120. I had to have the diagnostic code checked in my 2000 Subaru Forester, and the privately owned shop charged me $60 (turned out to be the same thing - an "oxygen sensor" was what tripped the light, and what tripped the oxygen sensor was the leaky gas-cap).
In general, open up the playing field to more competition, and the price will go down. That $60 STILL seems ridiculous, considering the minuscule amount of work actually performed, but you're paying for the knowledge.
The manufacturers have been keeping that knowledge secret from everyone who hasn't passed all the initiation rites and paid all the associated fees to become a "dealer" - anybody going to draw the obvious parallel to Scientology? :-)
The codes are available on the net if you know where to look. Often they are found on auto enthusiast websites. Websites like Focaljet.com
Not only that there is a great project for retrieving codes under linux. The project is called FreeDiag. It can be found at Sourceforge.net
Not only that, there are some great "open" cables you can build yourself. the BR interface is my fav. It happens to work very nicely with freediag.
Hope this helps people that are interested.
What could possibly go wrong?
Hasn't technology evolved to a point where we don't need to extract and look up arcane codes to determine what is wrong with our hardware (computers or cars)? I understand that there was a time when storing the text for error codes used up precious RAM/ROM, but come on!
I mean, how hard would it be to fit a car with an LED/LCD readout that says "Your gas cap is loose or missing." It doesn't have to be a fancy voice like in luxury cars. Just a little readout on or under the dash that tells you exactly what is wrong (as far as the car's sensors can tell, anyway). Maybe a nice message that tells you, "Your transmission has exploded. Seek professional help."
Geez.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
How did they find their car when it was time to go home?
I have the amazing ability to remember a random sequence of letters and numbers.
Most vehicles have them stamped in metal plates on the front and/or rear bumpers.
I think the legislation allowing people to go to outside dealers for warranty work will be even better. In my case, I am an Engineer with a love for cars. I bought $700 software to reprogram my car, and another $400 on software to scan and log the data from the On Board Computer (OBD-II). A few years ago, I threw an SES (Service Engine Soon) light, and immediately scanned it with my gear. It read, "Low Flow - EGR Malfunction". I took the car in to the dealer, since emissions are warrantied for 100k miles in California, and I told them it was an EGR malfunction. The dealer serviceman looked incredulous. He replied, "You're not supposed to know that!" Long story short, I threw a code a week later and scanned it again. When I saw a repeat of the same error code, I looked closer at my repair sheet from the dealer. They had replaced my Air Pump, otherwise known as a Smog Pump, which is totally unrelated to Exhaust Gas Recirculation, or EGR valve. I bought an EGR valve off E-bay and just replaced it myself, thinking the issue would be over. After I installed the new EGR valve, the code cleared, never to return.
The story takes a funny twist at this point. I received a notice from California DMV that my car was being held up for registration renewal because of an uncorrected emissions recall. I look at the notice and it's for the EGR replacement. I took the car back to the dealer and they certified they replaced the recalled part. In other words, they certified they replaced a part they were unable to diagnose and that I ultimately had to replace myself. It's for reasons such as this that I sold my Trans Am and stopped racing. I spent thousands of dollars ensuring my '97 Trans Am had nothing but CARB (California Air Resource Board) approved modifications for low emissions, and high performance (427 dyno'd horsepower at the tires), yet $15 an hour greasemonkeys couldn't effectively manage the emissions process. It became too stressful trying to find a smogshop where people had a clue.
John Schubert
yes, and you can also get hardware that plugs into your laptop to get certain codes yourself for less than $200, but only *some* codes are available to these machines. there are other codes that are kept secret so that certain diagnosis can not be made without the equipment which is reserved for authorized dealers only, and this is what the problem is.
Perhaps this is because a car is something tangible. Every Congressman understands the need to work on your own car. Perhaps many Congressmen have worked on their own cars in their 20's. It is simply very widely accepted that people fix their own cars, and for that reason, Congress has no problem protecting your rights to do so.
On the other hand, your XBox, or your computer, or whatever, is relatively new and the need to mess with these things is not very well understood. Why would you want to open that box and mess with the chips inside? Only because you're some pimply faced geek with no life, most likely, and that's just plain stupid. That is probably how Congress sees it.
Maybe in 20 years, we'll have people in Congress who are sick of not being able to boot whatever operating system they want on their computer, and then they'll understand the need to protect your rights in that regard. But the big software and media companies are pushing as strongly as they can to make information rare and expensive, and to make sure that anybody who copies it for whatever reason (legitimate or not) is a pirate and should suffer punishments worse than 1000 murderers, rapists, and kidnappers.
This is what we must fight against. We must make it known that it is retarded to fight against the nature of information. Ooooooooooh well.
This isn't as simple as you seem to think. There is one light, which lights up, and stays lit after any fault condition. The fault conditions can be for something as simple and trivial as a loose gas cap to something which will cause the engine to leap out and land in your lap. You have no way of knowing without going along to your local friendly dealer to have them tell you what the problem is (was) and to re-set the warning light. My Jeep Grand Cherokee had 27,000 miles on it when my warning light lit up. I took it along to the local Jeep shop, who connected the computer and diagnosed --- a loose gas cap. Now living in Oregon, you don't get to play with your own gas cap. In Oregon they really do believe those dire warnings that California churn out, that gasoline is a substance that can cause a multitude of serious health problems, and is a potential terrorist weapon, so you can't fill your own tank if you want to. Anyway, I really thought it was improbable, but took them at their word - they tightened the gas cap and reset the light. The next day, it came back on. Back to the Jeep merchant ... loose gas cap. So I reminded them that they said the same thing yesterday, and tightened the gas cap themselves, and it hadn't been touched since.
The "cleaned" the gas cap and re-set the light.
Two days later the light came on ...
"loose gas-cap" they said.... "Screw that" I said, "its something else - fix it under my bumper to bumper warranty."
They took the car in the next day, and called me late in the afternoon having done all the Jeep tests without any result. But they did mention that there were some tests that were only run by the on-board computer when the engine was cold, and hadn't run for several hours, and it was this one which was tripping the warning. They kept the car overnight.
Next day, it dutifully turned on the warning light for them.
With nothing left to check, they fitted a new gas-cap and sent me home (I am certain I saw them holding their fingers crossed behind their backs as I drove away...).
That fixed it. But it was interesting that there was no apparent way to test the system short of change a component, wait a day and try it. I just shudder to think how much this would have ended up costing me if it had happened out of warranty.
I don't think anyone mentioned this yet - so I will.
I'm running a project to write a GPL'ed car diagnostic tool that runs under Linux (and probably BSD too). It's called 'freediag' and the current version works well enough to read out error codes (and possibly zero them) on at least a few types of car.
You'll need to buy or build a cable to connect a laptop to the OBD-II port on your car. A simple serial cable won't do because you have to have optoisolators to protect your valuable laptop from the rigours of the crappy signal quality you get from most cars. If you buy one, it'll set you back maybe $70.
Anyway - the project needs developers - and it needs testers (there are lot of different interface cables and a lot of different subtle variations on the supposed standard car interface).
If you are interested - head over to http://freediag.sf.net (of course!) and sign up to the developer's mailing list.
www.sjbaker.org
Okay, this is another fine example of /. getting the ignorant all worked up over nothing.
/., they incite the exposure of ignorance by offering up one-sided, hot headed, articles and everyone runs with it like it's an "outrage". The true outrage is when people do not think their options through before going on a tangent about how evil empires are out to drain your pocket books. Of course, they are. That is what a business does. If you want the simplest, 1-step, solution to your problem, it will ALWAYS cost you more than if you did not mind putting a little effort into it.
:)
Here is what I do:
1) Stop by the dealership to get the problem diagnosed by the computer. This costs nothing.
2) Once the official cause of the diagnostic code is determined, request they fax you an explanation of exactly what needs to be done.
3) Call non-dealers and get quotes for the repairs. Use your faxed description so you can express the problem clearly to the other mechanic.
4) Take the vehicle to the lowest bidder.
See? That's not all that hard. The problem with
This whole thing reminds me of a scene where George Jetson presses a button on his food making machine, it doesn't work the first time. He then sprains his index finger on the second push. The end result was him kneeling to the floor crying about how difficult life is. Don't be like that.
Who cares about an Xbox gaming system... It doesn't make me money. But going without a car? I'm out of a job.
I paid $20+ thousand dollars for this hunk of metal and you're telling me that I'm supposed to just kowtow to the almighty dealer every time I want my check-engine light turned off? I don't think so. I should have the option of going to the dealer, to be sure, but if I'm having a drivability problem, I want to go to someone I trust with my car, someone that charges less and I'm happier with.
I've got an older Jeep Grand Cherokee with drivability problems. Thing is that Chrysler (Dodge) keeps pretty close tabs on their trouble codes so every time my car acts up, if I want to plug it into a computer to find out why its running rough I have to go to the dealer, pull into the service bay, talk to some dipshit who tells me to wait in the waiting room. By the time the technician 'calls my number' the car is running fine and I'm charged the minimum $75 fee for plugging the reader into my car. Because its just running rough, no trouble codes are set in the computer, and therefore the only way to catch the problem is when its happening.
Conversely, It started happening again and I called my local mechanic telling him that I'm coming over, "Its acting up again". I pull up and he walks out with his code reader in hand, wiping his hands on a red shop towel. Plugs in the computer and sees immediately that I've got a widget stuck in the maniform valve, giving the ejection seat a prematurely high voltage which was advancing the ignition timing to fire way before tea-time.
I dunno what was wrong that time, but all I know is it was a $110 part and $75 in labor and my Jeep is running like new...
Dealers have their place, but not in every case.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.