Hi I am looking for some reccomendations re a cheapish fault code scanner. I have been looking at VCDS but to be quite honest may be to complicated for me and a lot more than I need plus I have a few cars as well as my daughters etc. Came across OBDeleven 2 and OBDeleven 3. My cars are 06plate fabia, 08 octavia, 12 octavia and 09 Seat altea so not sure if the OBDeleven 3 may be too new for some of them. I just need a reliable fault code basic scanner with some live data feed. I doubt I would be coding as it looks way out of my level. At moment using very basic Xtool vag401. It works ok but slow and I cant seem to update it anymore.

Any reccomendations or advice welcome.

I'd suggest VCDS, it seems that you can sell it on if you leave car fixing or VW Group car owning, yes it does cost a bit but with use that pain will get diluted.

Too complicated - I don't think so, with time you could get more involved with it or just use it to interpret stored faults.

I'd love to say that I've spent time creating controller maps and so have made myself and my cars "bombproof" - but sadly, after only owning VCDS for maybe 25 years, life or laziness has got in the way.

If you think that you are sticking with VW Group cars, then maybe try buying a used VCDS HEX-V2, but make sure that know how many "VINs" remain with it and how much buying some new "VINs" is.

How VCDS now works is, if you buy it new, you used to get unlimited "VINs" which meant that you could perform re-coding on unlimited number of cars without needing to pay any more. The later/latest business model offers maybe "3 VINs" or "10 VINs" for the home user and DIYer, and "unlimited VINs" for the workshop user. When I upgraded my previous version to VCDS HEX-2 - "forced" on me when my older daughter bought a 2019 car, I had to move onto this newer "business model" which meant losing my "unlimited" older version, I chose "10 VINs" - they soon get used up if you are too generous or not careful, first one I used was on a friends Audi A6 as I offered to re-code his new battery which his friendly garage had failed to do, I absorbed that one as I was using that as a "dry run" for doing the same on my cars, the only other one that "threw away" was resetting the service lights on my mate's VW T-ROC - which he sold on a year later, that was me being stupid as I have Carista as I was an early adopter of that tool, my account is not limited in any way, so I typically use Carista for other people's service resets!

By the way, I'm not suggesting that you buy Carista, I only bought it and a couple of dongles to have in the car for "away from home issues".thatt

Edited 19 December, 202519 Dec by rum4mo