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I have a 2010 ford escape and I want to know if driving with a ELM327 Bluetooth OBD2 scanner will harm the car's computer. Would it be safe to drive a car with something connected to the OBD2 port?
Is this a good question?
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Panayiotis Michalos that’ll depend on the scanner. If it only reads to codes then you are okay (even so not sure why you would;-) If it places your vehicle into diagnostics mode then it is not okay to drive around with it. Take a look at your scanners manual and see what it says about the scanning etc.
[++https://www.elmelectronics.com/wp-conten... Looks like it’ll be okay.
You will notice immediately if it is not. your car may go into limp mode etc. I still wonder why you would want to drive around with your scanner attached :-)
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I can't find the manual is there a way to see if it puts it in diagnostic mode?
What do you mean by limp mode?
That is when your vehicle will not go over a set speed (~30mph) to ensure no permanent damage will come to the drive train. It is activated by the car's computer system and reduces the power output so as to lessen the chance for damage. It's a self protection mode :-)
@nick oh brother. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Limp mode is not something that you decide to go into but your car's computer makes that decision for you. I could imagine multiple reason for trying to collect the data from the OBD but if you have noticed the OP has not mentioned anything about any error etc., hence my curiosity. :-)
@oldturkey03 Yeah took 3 years but it's gone. This just came up again and that happened years ago.
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Driving with an ELM 327 if perfectly fine for viewing what is going on with your vehicle or even resetting codes. I drive with a Bluetooth ELM 327 device connected to my 2011 Ford Escape all the time so I can use my phone like a heads up display and it works great. When diagnosing an EVAP code, I was able to reset the code while driving to see if it would come back on.
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