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Originally Posted by Educaid
Either Mr. Dalton knows the answer and is not saying because someone had the audacity to meddle in his area of expertise in which case you can draw your own conclusions or he doesn't know the answer. Either way, his reply was rude and uncalled for. By the way, I bought one of Skiier's devices and it works well.
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I think Art was just having a little fun, and besides he's right. A salesman should know his product. One thing that really ticks me off is to go a store and ask a clerk to answer some questions about a product only to have the clerk start reading the info on the box. Hell, I can do that and probably better.
Now for a lesson on code readers. The price of a code reader depends on the amount of engineering that goes into it. Top of the line is from MB. The cost is over $10,000 with a yearly maintenance of a thousand or more. It will do everything including reprogram replaced components to talk to the CANs (Controled Area Networks). It can monitor real time data flow. Next down from that would be an HHT(Hand Held Tester). This is also MB and no longer used by the dealers. It is only good up to around 2002 models. They still pop up for sale ocassionaly on the internet for around $3500. They also can read codes, diagnose, and make modules talk to each other. Moving down the line comes Baum and a couple of other after market scanners that are geared to German cars. These scanners run somewhere between $5000 and $10,000. They do an excellent job pulling codes, resetting codes, and doing diagnostics, but can't make the CAN buses communicate. Dropping down one step further are products like Snap-On that are geared toward American cars. They take a feeble stab at German cars. They are also somewher in the $5000 range. I had a CEL on a late 90s MB. I scanned it with a Snap-ON, and couldn't get any codes. I used a second Snap-On scanner with the same results. I hooked up a Baum and got the three codes I needed to know. WAAAY at the bottom of the list is the $39.95 scanner from Kame-Apart. For that kind of money, you can't expect it to do too much more than your garage door remote. Just because you can't pull any codes, doesn't mean they aren't there. So there you have it folks, and by the way I don't know exactly what all the scanners cost. I was doing ball parks for perspective.Please don't post that the Snap-On unit is $3,984 or something to that affect.Good luck.