S197 3V Q: Accessing the OBD-II to see if the vehicle has been abused?

[MBalboni]

I am interested in getting another 2012 Boss 302 and want to know what I can find out about how the car was driven from the OBD-II. I read one thread on another website that said if the vehicle has accessible data logs in its infotainment or instrument cluster User Interface, you may be able to find out how the car was driven.

Q1: Does a 2012 Boss allow for owners to check these data logs? I sold my first Boss about 9 years ago so I don't have a car to test this on.

Q2: How can I verify whether the engine management system has been tampered with? I talked to a guy last week that has a 2012 with the Track Key, and apparently 2 owners ago, that previous owner tampered with the factory settings which cause the Track Key not to work, among other things.

My sole interest is in the vehicle computer system, as I am well aware of other obvious physical signs that the car may have been punished and/or driven hard (e.g. suspension mods, excessive brake wear, etc.).

Thanks

 

[Dave_W]

I'd recommend checking out ForScan for getting the diagnostic data. There's not so much complete "data logging" that's done in the ECU/PCM; it's mostly just the normal Diagnostic Trouble Code info that you can get with any good OBD scan tool. It won't really tell you "how a car was driven" unless that driving "broke*" something and there's a DTC logged. There is some info that could be telling - if the P1000 DTC code is set, the car has not had enough drive time to run all emissions checks, which could be a result of someone resetting DTC codes that are causing a check engine light (MIL).

*I use "broke" to indicate more than physical damage here - a DTC can be (and often is) thrown for intermittent sensor failures or readings considered "out of range" by the PCM. Some DTC events also have "freeze frame" data captured when they occur.

List of generic OBD-II channels (PIDs), many of which are just real-time sensor data -

OBD-II PIDs - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

There's also a small amount of memory in the PCM that acts like an aircraft "black box" flight data recorder, logging some driver inputs and vehicle data, that can be accessed by law enforcement (or others with access to a specific Bosch tool) to help in accident reconstruction. But it captures less than a minute of data, and is overwritten in a loop unless an accident-type event is sensed like an air bag deployment. Actually, there's a decent article talking about it here and very detailed info on recovering Ford data here.

As far as knowing if the PCM has been reprogrammed, the graphic of the ForScan connection info shows "strategy file" name and copyright. I'm guessing that an aftermarket tune would have a strategy file with the vendor's copyright info. Just a guess, though.

FORScan documentation v1.3.x