A friend of mine is looking to purchase a relatively inexpensive (under $200) OBD II scanner that will support all new and newer cars, with live data and ABS, Airbag, Transmission module data access.
He would prefer a Bluetooth type scanner that works with an Android but he would not mind to get a "stand alone" scanner. He said he has an older scanner but it does not work with newer (2014 and up) vehicles.



I know how to use Google but need advice from those who work on cars for a living and(or) are in the "know zone" on this subject. I used to work on cars for a living but a lot has changed in the last 20 years. I don't know what's on the market these days. Any advice will be appreciated.

Any quality ELM 327 bluetooth dongle should work for most vehicles using the Torque Pro app.
You're looking at ~$30 total investment.
Not all vehicles will give you access to the all the sub-systems through an OBD2 dongle.

What do we need to access sub-systems, if you don't mind me asking? What would you use if you had a small business in your garage, to work on cars? He does it as a side business in his garage.

This.  I paid about $10 for my dongle and then bought Torque Pro.

Edit: Tell him to buy Torque Pro first and see if he can pull the data he wants in the factory options. Also do some googling...I know there are codes to pull more information.  I have a couple parameters for my tacoma that are not on the factory list of options.

The above are vehicle specific so it might be tough if he works on different cars all the time.

What I've found is that if I go back to the same vehicle, it connects just fine, but any time I switch vehicles with the dongle I have to re-pair it.

I was referring to codes to pull data that's normally not provided. A tacoma forum I used to look at had codes to pull extra data from tacoma sensors that are not normally supported by Torque.

How would he go about doing that, out of curiosity?
I've seen people write custom PID's for unsupported sensors.

I'm just a freeloader that uses codes the other guys came up with.

Here's an example of one for trans fluid temp:

OBD2 Mode and PID:
21D9

Long Name:
Transmission Fluid Temperature 1

Short Name:
TFT 1

Minimum Value:
0.0

Maximum value:
220.0

Scale factor:
x1

Unit Type:
*F (there is a degree symbol in Torque to use in place of the *)

Equation:
((((E*256)+F) * (7/100) – 400)/10)

Thanks guys. I passed this information over to him.