Modern cars have MASSIVE digital displays, loads of computers systems monitoring every subsystem and internal diagnostics running to the OBDII ports.
Why the hell can’t we get diagnostic feeds on our console or infotainment center?
I’m not aware of any car manufacturers selling their own diagnostic ASICs, so it’s not an extra margin to squeeze afaik…
What gives? Any insight into this beyond the usual muh corporate profits conjecture?
The same reason they won’t let you buy the dealership scan software for under 10k. Almost every maker has an in house scanner and due to standards they only need to provide certain data to non dealer level tools and I believe the standard only exists for gas powered vehicles that need to provide OBD2 data. Plenty of makers (BMW is horrible about this) stuff away data where a normal obd scanner just won’t access and it’s gotten much worse with the overuse of CANBus (I sure love when my trunk lid sensor prevents my fucking car from starting).
Thats where your snapon and other third party scanners start bringing a gap, but even those are extremely pricey and need to be updated constantly and even those usually won’t do EVERYTHING.
Fwiw the cheapest and best way I’ve found is basically to pirate the dealer software and get a compatible knockoff scanner (vxdiag for example). I have Ford IDS and a couple others this way but assume that the software is gonna install something malicious and dedicate an old Thinkpad or something to it.
Depending on the age of your vehicle something like Torque Pro is extremely useful. I have mine monitoring transmission temp, long and short term fuel trims, O2 sensor signals, voltage, mass air speed, intake temp. It’s more than enough data to see something coming long before it becomes an issue.