> I think once CAN bus started becoming ubiquitous beyond OBD-II compliance [...] OBD has always been a small subset of what's happening on the CAN bus, or rat

> I think once CAN bus started becoming ubiquitous beyond OBD-II compliance [...] OBD has always been a small subset of what's happening on the CAN bus, or rather busses, nowadays. Some of the vendor specific things are necessarily unique, but a lot of it is deliberately obfuscated and undocumented because of various idiotic things. There is truth to the electronic systems in a car having become orders of magnitude more complex than 20 years ago, but that in itself doesn't quite cover it. Some problems arise without actual malicious intent because every itty bitty control module, of which there are nowadays several dozen in every car, is very likely outsourced by the OEMs, and the suppliers are as bad at following specs as the OEMs are at writing them. As market pressures have resulted in OEMs and suppliers having more adversarial relationships, both sides have become less willing to fix the other side's mistakes, and the customer is the one who takes the bath for it. The only ones winning in the automotive industry's OEM-supplier setup are wall-street, as they encourage the race to the bottom just to squeeze all possible short-term value out of the industry (and often taxpayer money) through an endless cycle of bankruptcies, spin-offs, and mergers. Another problem is an acute lack of competency regarding computer systems design and implementations, as many OEMs are still stuck in processes meant for mechanical components, not electronics and software. Even subtracting all the above idiocy, the industry as a whole sees no money in providing a servicable automobile. Unless the incentive changes because of consumer behaviour or regulation, nobody's going to put in the extra engineering work to improve the mechanic's "interface" as long as there's simply no profit in it.