Performance tester measures everything including horsepower

[dearborntbird]

I have been looking at a Scanguage recently. It measures at least 25 different specs on your car. It reads codes and can turn off the check engine light. It does many things. It reads transmission temperature. Amazing, it reads the engine hoursepower. It will give you your 0-60 times, your 1/4 mile time, and your 60-0 braking distance. This is cheaper than putting your car on a dyno to measure horsepower. It takes maybe 10 seconds to measure horsepower while you run it up to full power in one gear. You can do 10 cars in just the time it takes to get up to 60 MPH. I bought one a couple of days ago also. I love it. My bird is still in the storage, but I tested my Mustang with 305 horsepower, and it read 314 HP. My friends supercharged SSR read 591 HP. Look it up under Scanguage. They cost about $160. An OBD2 costs probably $300 and only does the codes. Does anyone out there know about this machine or does anyone have one? It is very small. It plugs into the computer port under the dash.

Paul

[PaulD]

Re: Performance tester measures everything including horsepower

Paul,
I have one that I keep connected all the time. Handy to monitor multiple items including failure codes. I was also interested in the HP reading but after some investigation, I believe the reading is very "approximate". Although some cars have the right info to measure this with some precision, our birds do not. I caled the Mfg to see what they could tell me about how they compute HP and they were very secretive about it...would not give me any firm info. However, I am pretty sure they pick up on some of the available info such as torque and RPM and then calculate the HP based on some standard formulas. I compare my HP reading to what I expect to be getting and my best guess is that the HP reading are probably about 5-10 HP high. However, it does allow you to compare before and after HP reading when you have done a mod that should impact HP.

[dearborntbird]

Re: Performance tester measures everything including horsepower

Paul,

I will update the info when I take the Bird out of storage. I have tested it on nearly ten cars and it is very close to the stated horsepower. My friend and I use it also to keep track of transmission temperature in our motorhomes. When you tow a car, you should keep track of the temp in the transmission especially when going up the mountains in Yellowstone.

Paul