Motoring writer Gareth Butterfield plugs the Carly OBD scanner into his poorly Panda to see if he can dodge a hefty garage bill
We've all been there. You're driving along in your car and a yellow "check engine" light flicks up on the dashboard.
If you're anything like me, you get this sickening feeling that you're about to crawl into a layby in a plume of smoke and the repair bill is going to eat up your entire year's holiday budget.
I love modern cars, but they do have an annoying habit of being able to ruin your day over something that might turn out to be as trivial as a sensor that's got a bit of dirt in it.
And when a warning light comes on, the most sensible thing to do is to take the car to a garage and ask the mechanics to find out what's wrong. If you're lucky, that'll be a freebie, but there are dealers out there charging up to £100 to plug in their special machine and diagnose the fault.
I'm sure most people are aware that you can now buy fault code readers to find the error yourself, and these can cost less than a tenner if you shop around, but all they do is give you a code. And then you have to work out what that code means.
Take my little Fiat Panda, for example, as I write this it's currently in the garage because a sensor has shuffled off its mortal coil. I know which sensor it was that's broken because my bargain code reader told me. But when I Googled the code, I became half convinced that there had in fact been a catastrophic crankshaft failure.
And then I tried using a neat little device I'd been sent for testing called a Carly OBD scanner. Carly works in a similar way, plugging in to your car's OBD port (all cars post 1996 have one) and downloading codes from the car's central computer.
Unlike cheap code readers, however, Carly goes a stage further than just telling you which code has been stored, it takes you to a page that advises you what might and might not be causing it.
It is SO much easier than a blind search on Google. By looking out for other symptoms I was able to tell, quite quickly, that my engine wasn't about to implode, and that it was almost certainly a sensor that had given up the ghost. It's a £30 part, apparently, and a doddle to replace. My mechanic pointed to it straight away and said it'd be a quick and cheap job, not something I usually hear from him. I figured it was easier to let him do the job. I'm not a fan of getting my hands dirty for the sake of a 10-minute labour bill.
Importantly, I had also established there was no danger in driving the car. According to Google it was possible my crankshaft might be turning into a string of sausages and one false move would ruin the engine, but Carly's advice, fed into the accompanying app by genuine mechanics, was not to panic. That's the sort of advice I like.
There's lots of other things Carly can do, too. Because it has manufacturer-level diagnostics, you'll find codes you simply wouldn't discover with cheaper scanners.
I hooked it up to my wife's posh BMW and was quite alarmed to find 30 fault codes. I flicked through each one, all categorised from major to minor issues, and spotted plenty we already knew about from work we'd had done in previous years.
I even found a few that were warning us about a low battery level – and these, I could tell by the mileage, occurred when the car was left standing for too long during the pandemic.
So I used the Carly app to reset the fault codes. Carly recommends doing this, then driving the car for three days, then reading the codes again. And that's what I did.
Eight codes returned. Two of which I still don't understand, but Carly says they're minor. One of them Carly tells me needs attention, so that's what we'll be doing. None of these faults are severe enough to prevent me driving the car, but it's booked in at the garage soon just in case.
The Carly app bundles in a Smart Mechanic feature, which is how you access this pre-loaded advice from mechanics on what might be causing the problem. There's even some simple troubleshooting steps, guiding you through the steps you'll need to take to further diagnose the issue.
It's all very clever, but it's not perfect. Firstly, I had a problem connecting to my Fiat Panda. Carly says it's one of the very few cars not compatible, but they gave me a tip to try telling the scanner that my car was a 2013 model instead of a 2011, and it worked well enough to give me a code.
The pricing is a bit odd, too. As a "basic package", which will read fault codes, Carly's website will tell you the cost is £74.80. And to access its enhanced features, you'll need to opt for the premium package, which can run well past £100.
But, quite importantly, Carly has some offers on at the moment, which make the prices significantly more inviting. For example, if you have a Ford, the premium package with all the Ford features is discounted from £60.63 to £53.89. Adding Smart Mechanic, which feels like a must to me, would pile £35.99 on to the cost of the device and the app access. You can also add a £33 all brands option for a further £33. So that would be an offer price of £122.88. It's not bad for a bit of peace of mind.
It would be exactly the same price for an all-brands device, with Smart Mechanic, for my wife's BMW and, if you have a BMW, you have one of the cars that can make the Carly device do some really interesting things.
Because, for a few cars, it also has a coding feature, which can alter the way things work. Starting from the car's standard template, which you back up at the beginning of every session, you can change the appearance of the driver display, change some of the automatic functions that the car might have hidden away, or even individualise things like the way the lights work.
For example, I've added a digital speedometer to the dashboard in my wife's car, it took seconds. I've also set it to start up every time in its Eco driving mode. I could, if I wanted to disable or change warning lights, alter the stop/start default settings, play with the interior lights and countless other things.
The number of customisation options is absolutely astonishing, and it's all really easy to do, and perfectly safe.
I think Carly is pretty good value for money. Yes, there are much cheaper fault code readers, but this is one of the few that can give you manufacturer-level diagnostics, and that Smart Mechanic feature could be a godsend one day.
But if you have a BMW it's such a great piece of kit and, even if you never use it for diagnostics (which, let's face it, you will at some point), you might consider it worth the investment to be able to "tweak" your car for your liking.
