Code cracker

27 February 2009  

VEHICLE engineer Peter Coombes has emerged from a year of research into diagnostic fault codes with a message of hope for garages.

/>The Right To Repair campaigner and businessman – who started his career as a VM engineer designing prototype vehicles – has completed work on a workshop guide to more than 2,700 EOBD fault co

/>He hopes the book, called Code Breaker, will help technicians get to the bottom of how fault codes are generated and what they mean in practical te

/>Peter (pictured right) spent a year researching fault codes through ISO – the organisation that allocates code names to particular faults throughout Europe – from his company Mototek in Es

/>“Five years ago my view was that technology was getting so complex we, as an industry, might only have a five year run before it all got too much,” said Pe

/>“Now I’ve completed the book, I realise that while things have moved on, you can still deal with that technol

/>“I was getting the feeling that technology was going to keep everyone down but it’s

/>“I’ve realised we just need the right knowledge and tools,” continued Peter. “We don’t have to be defea

/>“The key is understanding. When you understand something, you can deal with it,” he ad

/>The Code Breaker book lists thousands of codes by number and name together with component descriptions and practical descriptions of what individual codes m

/>Peter said that while many technicians had the skills to cure complex faults, they were often confused by jar

/>“We get a lot of calls from people asking what a particular code means. They don’t ask how to cure a particular problem because they can do that already, they just don’t understand what the code names are supposed to refer

/>“That’s a question of interpreting what ISO actually meant when they allocated the particular name to the individual fault code,” he ad