These days most independent garages have diagnostic equipment to enable their technicians to access a vehicle’s computer to discover the fault code and determine what needs to be done if there’s a problem related to the vehicle’s computer systems.
Such equipment has been cleverly ‘reverse engineered’ specialised diagnostic equipment which is available to the independent aftermarket.
Vehicle manufacturers, seeing this as undermining what they believe should be their exclusive market, have decided to ‘shut-out’ the independents by manufacturing vehicles which cannot be ‘hard wired’ to a diagnostic computer.
If the EU Commission allowed that, the independent aftermarket would be ‘shut-out’ of carrying out any diagnostic analysis, other than purchasing the right to do so from the vehicle manufacturers.
Previous experience suggests that this would not be at a ‘reasonable price’. This video explains the problem in more detail.
Click here to view the video from the FIGIEFA website