Editorial policy
Quick answer
Five rules govern everything here: nothing is invented, nothing is claimed as tested, nothing is asserted about a reader's specific vehicle, safety language is never softened, and a question with no honest answer gets a refusal rather than a plausible guess.
1. Nothing is invented
No product identifier, price or image on this site was made up. Every one comes from a verified live listing, and a listing that does not return all three is left out rather than patched with a plausible substitute. The same rule applies to figures in prose: where a number cannot be sourced, the page says so instead of estimating.
2. Nothing is claimed as tested
This site has not tested any scan tool, and it never says otherwise in any wording. Recommendations are built from published manufacturer specifications, the capabilities each listing states outright, update and subscription policies, price positions and owner reports. That is genuinely weaker evidence than hands-on use, and naming the weakness is more useful to you than concealing it.
3. Nothing is asserted about your specific vehicle
Code definitions are standardised, but coverage, connector placement, drive cycle procedure and the behaviour behind a code all vary by manufacturer and model year. So the pages say "on many vehicles" and "check this against the specific vehicle" rather than making promises they have no way to keep. Any site that tells you a tool definitely works on your car without knowing the model year is guessing.
4. Safety language is never softened
A flashing check engine light means stop driving, and the page says stop driving. An airbag fault means the restraint system may not deploy in a crash, and the page says that. An ABS fault means the anti-lock function is disabled and the brakes revert to conventional braking, and the page says that too. Hedging on these to keep a page comfortable would make the whole site less trustworthy on the things that matter most.
Equally, severity is not inflated. Marking every code as urgent would be just as dishonest, and it would make the genuinely urgent ones invisible. The four point severity scale is used across its full range.
5. A question with no answer gets a refusal
Every decision tool here can return no answer, and that state is treated as a result rather than an error. It explains why the question has no correct answer and what to do instead. Those branches are exercised by an automated sweep across every combination of every input, because a branch that nothing ever runs is a branch nobody ever checked.
Style rules
- No month names in evergreen copy, because a page naming one is stale the moment it passes. Years are fine where the data genuinely changes annually.
- Quick answers are written to survive being quoted alone, which means they contain the specific number or product name rather than a promise to explain later.
- Product names are always links. A named product that is not clickable is a dead end for the reader.
- One affiliate disclosure per page, in the footer. Never a banner, never repeated on cards.
Common questions
What happens when you get something wrong?
It gets corrected on the page rather than quietly deleted. Corrections sent through the contact form are read first and acted on fastest, and naming the specific page and specific claim makes that considerably quicker. A reference site that cannot be corrected is not a reference site.
Why does the site avoid claiming testing?
Because it has not tested anything, and the claim is trivially easy to make and impossible for a reader to check. Manufacturer specifications, published standards and owner reports are weaker evidence than genuine hands-on use, and saying so plainly is more useful than pretending otherwise.
Why will the tools sometimes not answer?
Because some questions have no correct answer, and producing a plausible number for them is worse than producing nothing. Asking for bidirectional control on a forty dollar budget gets a refusal that explains why, because the alternative is recommending a tool that physically cannot do the job the reader described.