Labour Day has come and gone and with that the end of the summer has come with it. We thought this would be an excellent opportunity for us to discuss what the future looks like for VehicleLink and what we have coming down the pipeline for the rest of 2023. Without further delay, let’s dive in!
Impact of Wildfires
Our office was subjected to some rather lengthy delays due to the wildfire situation around our area. Unfortunately this has likely scaled back some of our ambitions for 2023. Wildfires delayed our August update by over 2 weeks, and have essentially pushed back many of our other features by a similar amount of time. We’ll eventually get back on track, but these delays will likely equate to us providing slightly looser dates on new features for the next few months as we work to catch up. We appreciate all of your understanding when it comes to this matter.
DTCViewer
A new DTCViewer is soon coming to VehicleLink. We’ve always wanted VehicleLink to be a diagnostic tool that technicians can use to do dealer-level diagnostics for a fraction of the cost, and our new DTCViewer is part of that goal. The DTCViewer will allow for a tech to scan either a Vehicle’s Network or an individual module and view all DTCs for the respective network or module. The DTCViewer will also display:
-The name of the module reporting the DTC
-Whether or not the DTC is triggering any indicators to be illuminated
-Whether the DTC is current or historical
-The actual code for the DTC so that it could be looked up for more information
-A quick description of the DTC in case you lack the ability to look it up for more info.
The new DTCViewer will appear on a vehicle-to-vehicle basis as it’s implementation will require remapping of an entire vehicle’s networks for it to be truly effective. Which brings us to our next subject.
Full Vehicle Support
Up until now VehicleLink has generally only supported instrument clusters and a small handful of other modules. Moving forward we will slowly be rolling out full vehicle support. Like the DTCViewer this will require us remapping any of our existing vehicles that we support. But once completed for a given vehicle this will give us the ability to:
-Read/Write Configuration and Coding Data across various different modules(AsBuilt, EOL, etc)
-Check a module for DTCs and clear them
-Run self-tests and diagnostics on modules
-Run configuration procedures for the case of having to replace a module
-And much more
As with everything we develop this will roll out on Ford Vehicles first as our team generally drives Fords, but we hope to bring this to GM and Chrysler vehicles in the future. When a vehicle is mapped for Full Vehicle Support it will also simultaneously map it for the DTCViewer, so you’ll generally see these two launch together.
GM Instrument Cluster Conversion for UDC and UDD Opt Codes
As we have recently launched our GM Cluster conversion for newer Cadillacs with UHS Opt Codes we figure now is a good time to announce that we found a way to do it for lower trim level clusters on the following vehicles:
-Cadillac XT4 2019
-Cadillac XT4 2020-2022
-Cadillac XT5 2020-2022
-Cadillac XT6 2019
-Cadillac XT6 2020-2022
-Chevrolet Silverado 2019
-Chevrolet Silverado 2020-2022
-GMC Sierra 2019
-GMC Sierra 2020-2022
This will launch as faces become available to convert these units to a US Speed sweep. Unfortunately this is going to take a while to produce these parts, so we’re working with our partners to try to accelerate this process. As the parts become available this feature will roll out alongside the parts.
Ford Instrument Cluster Reading and Writing
We’ve been preparing to roll out an incredibly beneficial feature for instrument cluster conversion customers, and that is the ability to read and write Ford Instrument Cluster EEPROMS over OBD. Unlikely most other manufacturers, Ford purposely does not build a way to read or write the data of the EEPROM into it’s instrument clusters. This leads to a situation where to convert an instrument cluster to Canadian specs from US for example you’d have to do considerable amounts of disassembly just to get at the EEPROM and risk damaging the unit. Soon that will no longer be the case.
We have successfully written and injected code into Ford Instrument Clusters that will allow you to Read and Write the EEPROM over OBD in the span of a few quick seconds on a handful of newer Ford vehicles such as:
-2018-2021 Lincoln Navigator
-2015-2020 Ford F150
-2016-2019 Ford Explorer Platinum
-2018-2022 Ford Mustang(Fully Digital)
This will allow you to not only read and write these EEPROMs on a testbench setup, but also in the vehicle, meaning for the process of converting a vehicle with a fully digital instrument cluster and a difficult disassembly/assembly procedure such as the 2018-2021 Lincoln Navigator you’ll no longer have to remove the instrument cluster from the vehicle.
It’s worth noting that VehicleLink will not handle converting files for you automatically between KM and MI units when the EEPROM Reading/Writing feature launches and that will still have to be done in another tool for the time being. This feature will slowly roll out across Ford Vehicles that support it and we hope to expand it to other popular instrument cluster platforms produced for Ford gradually over time.
Now you might be asking when does this all launch? As we can see above, it’s a bit complicated. Most of these features are not something that will launch supporting every vehicle that they can all at once, but will rather gradually come out and add support as we get our hands on vehicles to do the required development. All of these features will start to trickle out in the final months of 2023. We’ll put a closer date on when you can expect these features as we get closer to each one of them.