It's not the manufacturers fault. The regulations on exhaust gas and fuel consumption is what forces the car companies to require so much monitoring, realtime engine adjustment and exhaust treatment systems. No car company wants a vehicle that has so much complexity that it keeps having issues. That just makes them look bad, even if they do profit from the repair.
McBryce.
No. Just NO. I lived and worked as a mechanic through the smog-strangled 80s, and while that WAS a low point in automobile manufacture... modern closed-loop EFI engines are just plain hands-down better, in every way. More efficient, more power per kilo, and because they aren't running with a crankcase full of carbon coke blowby from running rich half the time, the engines last longer almost in every application. Oil changes are cleaner at 5 and 10k intervals than a carbureted V8 was at 3K, and all that not-wasted oil and carcinogenic blowby waste is better for the environment too, not JUST the cleaner air.
Say what you want about the cars themselves, but design life for a iron-cylinder-wall V8 was 80K miles before it started to burn oil, and it required carb/ignition tuneups during that usage and the timing chain was running on borrowed time. Nowadays, if we don't get twice that from a 4-banger with nothing but regular oil changes, there's something fucking WRONG. I've seen with my own eyes cars running well with 160,000 on the original spark plugs!
I agree that the car companies have managed to turn OBD into a clusterfuck of software obfuscation... but that does NOT mean that OBD/OBDII was a bad idea. It just means that these bastards are such utterly selfish greedy shitheads they could fuck up a wet dream.
mnem
You may have mis-understood the point I was trying to get across. I agree 100% with everything you say, I was just trying to point out that there are reasons why these things have happened and they were not done to make the car unrepairable for the end user nor for any other "evil industry" reasons. They were done to satisfy legal requirements and market requirements. I have worked in the automotive electric/electronic industry for over 27 years, going from schematic design right up to strategic planning, so I have seen the changes first hand. I haven't always agreed with where things were going, neither for the end user, nor for the industry, but I understand why they had to happen anyway.
McBryce.
I totally agree with what both of you are saying. My own case demonstrates it clearly. I can compare my first and third trucks.
The first is from 1996, was a half-ton with minimal equipment. Powerplant was a 4.3l v6 engine with 5-speed manual transmission. Fuel economy was 27 l/100km on a good day on the drive between Toronto and my parents' place.
My third and current truck is from 2015, is a half-ton with lots of extras including crew cab and long cargo box, 4x4, air conditioning, etc. Powerplant is a monster overkill 5.7l with 8-speed automatic transmission. Fuel economy is 12.9 l/100km on the same drive as above, including carrying the family and dog (which is too big to be a miniature horse).
So the technology clearly gives a huge boost in both power and fuel economy. What is not to like about that?
Now, open the hood of both trucks. The new truck only has the windshield wiper fill, the engine oil fill and the battery visible. Everything else is concealed by covers that are secured with a variety of different security bits. Not only will doing anything void the warranty, but it takes approximately 20 different driver bits just to see anything before being able to plan out the actual work. Also, switching to winter wheels for half the year causes the dashboard displays to alarm incessantly; the winter rims are still OEM just not matching the serial numbers of the stock summer rims; absolutely frustrating! The old one was a dream for adding extra lights front and back and a power point in the cargo box. Clearly marked were two extra terminals on the fuse fox rated for 100A each. Right to repair and to customize/accessorize is a huge concern of mine. Warranty on the new one will be over soon, so I might be able to report back next summer just how bad it has gotten.
The good old days of the old truck? They were good old days! I took that truck on trips to go skiing, mountaineering, rock climbing, cycling, more cycling and so on. The truck was not great at all, but the greatness was what we did with our vehicles in our younger days. The rock climbing trip was awesome, but driving to the crag was where I discovered the truck would jounce on steep gravel roads and the transmission would pop out of gear. Nowadays, SWMBO gets concerned going 5 km/h over the speed limit (the normal flow of traffic around here is 20 over the limit), since we have a kid in the back seat. Yes, the driving experience was better in the past, but not at all due to the vehicle.
I have no problems with OBD/2. It is just a straight-forward message protocol; I really do not think the obfuscation lies therein. Request a parameter and receive the data; it is pretty simple. I think OBD ran on J1850 on the old truck, but not sure since I never needed it. Repair the truck and normal operation would resume. OBD2 runs just fine as well on CAN-BUS on the new truck. It does the same thing as the old truck. However, it is all the other stuff running on the CAN-BUS or on other buses that is obfuscated. For example, enabling the heated seats is done by some secret command over the CAN-BUS, but the secret code costs $10,000CAD
from the dealer; no thanks! Those simple code readers are almost all using a ELM327 (or counterfeit) PIC that reads the OBD codes on the various signal protocols; they work pretty much the same on the old truck as on the new truck.
However, if you go lower-level to CAN-BUS, then things get interesting in the new truck. Disassemble the air vent just to the left of the centre console sound system control and fish out the CAN-BUS connector hidden inside. That allows reading and sending things like door locks and so on. Those code readers do not work here. The only way is to have full control of your device on the CAN-BUS and then reverse-engineer the messages. My device for this is a Carloop.io; however, it only does CAN-BUS; I am borrowing from that design to do ISO9141 and KWP and I hope to finish that some day in the future, not sure when...
Getting back on topic, there is a TDS3024B on auction with 15 hours remaining for those in Canada:
https://www.gcsurplus.ca/mn-eng.cfm?snc=wfsav&sc=enc-bid&scn=370290&lcn=518820&lct=L&srchtype=&lci=&str=1&lotnf=1&frmsr=1&sf=ferm-closIt would be an upgrade on my bandwidth, but funds are short since someone crunched the front bumper of the car while parked at the grocery store. Maybe the resident dwagon would be interested? Maybe Kosmic as well, but the shipping distance might make it expensive.
[EDIT: who is our TEA member in the vicinity of Montreal? All I found searching back was @mnem's Montreal Steak seasoning and now for some reason I am hungry at midnight!]
My past purchases from this source have all been good units, but there is no guarantee of that.