The Bay and VAGCOM

[A3Chris]

Hi all,

I've been a member on here some years now and have gleamed a lot of useful information. My car is a 2000 AGU A3 1.8TSport.

Up until now i have been able to sort any issues out myself with a bit of searching on this site and experience. I am now finding myself in a position where I need a diagnostic tool. I have looked into vag.com from RossTech, but there is no way I can warrant paying the price for the full version to only use occasionally. I have looked on the bay, and reading various other threads on here, some people have purchased vagcom cables and had no issues while others have had issues. Can anyone tell me which one is best to go for, and what the reliability is like?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
Chris

 

[JD09]

Hi Chris,

I bought a cable from eBay for my 2002 S3 and downloaded the free version of VCDS from RossTech. This has done me fine up until now, where I need more options. These are contained in the paid for VCDS which is only $99 (£65), so will be paying for that when I get the chance and sorting the error I caused on my lights by adjusting them manually!

It all works fine (USB).

 

[S3 Paul]

I'm a chode for posting things I shouldn't.

 

[leshkin]

Alternatively, if you have an Android phone, you could use an app such as Torque and a BT dongle to do some of the stuff VCDS can do. It can even do logging and send data to an e-mail or an online telemetry site that the developer has made.

It's not as fully-featured as VCDS, but it does support the standard OBD codes, etc... plus you can pair the BT dongle with a laptop and use some of the VCDS alternatives to do diagnostics.

here is a video of it - [ytv]OCZyxrS_ixY[/ytv]