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race cars such as the 981 and 718 club sports. The frustrating part about these models is that Porsche really made it difficult for resetting even the service lights for general maintenance. Unfortunately, the aftermarket diagnostics has not been able to keep up well with Porsche in this regard, forcing a lot of shops to either buy the fac- tory equipment, or do it through encrypted pass thru diagnostic de- vices which require online service and hourly fees to use and whose pricing structure is determined by the manufacturer. Without the factory tools, oftentimes the cost to reset a service light makes it unable to competitively price the service being performed by inde- pendent repair facilities. To date it is the most expensive diagnostic system Porsche has released....by far.
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The PIWIS 3 menus
So are there any aftermarket solutions to servicing your own Porsches? Well, that depends. With the earlier generations, there are quite a few options that still work decently. I would say that for models up through 2014 the selection is pretty good in the af- termarket. General OBDII scan- ners can do basic functions like reading that check engine light that is illuminated on your dash, but will usually not reset service lights. They can also give you some live values such as air flow meter voltage, temperature sen- sors, etc, but that is about where
it ends. The problem with these scanners is they only give you a generic code which might be translated into a slightly different problem that the code you will get with a factory scanner. This can lead to heading down the wrong path on occasion. A product called Durametric has been around for many years and can do a lot of functions on models from the late
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Der Sportwagen
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