Spent $180 on a fancy scan tool that just confused me more

Picked up a high-end Autel scanner from a guy on Craigslist for 180 bucks. Thought it would make diagnosing a misfire on my neighbor's 2010 Camry a breeze. It gave me a bunch of codes and live data I couldn't make heads or tails of. Eventually I just checked the spark plugs like a normal person and found a cracked one. Has anyone else overpaid for a tool and then gone back to the simple way?

2 comments

2 Comments

shane_perry296h ago

oh man, tell me about it. i did the exact same thing last year. found a gently used snap-on verus on facebook marketplace for like 500 bucks. thought i was getting a steal, you know? brought it home and hooked it up to my old jeep that had a check engine light on for a lean code. it gave me all this live data and graphs and i was like "okay great... now what?" spent hours scrolling through menus and watching youtube tutorials. ended up just cleaning the maf sensor with some brake cleaner and the code went away. that simple. sometimes all this fancy technology just gets in the way of actually using your brain and your hands.

jason731h ago

@shane_perry29 that Snap-on story is painful because I know exactly how that feels. Spent a whole weekend with that Autel trying to figure out why the computer was showing a misfire on cylinder 3 but the data was all over the place. Ended up just pulling the coil packs and swapping them around like my grandpa taught me twenty years ago. The damn thing had a bad ground wire under the intake manifold that no scanner would have ever caught. These expensive tools are great for guys who already know what they're looking for, but for a regular person they just give you more info than you know what to do with. The cracked plug on that Camry was staring me right in the face the whole time, just had to actually look instead of trusting a screen.