Techstream loses communication with ECU using mini-VCI cable. Bad cable, or Techstream b ing glitchy

I had a nightmare bleeding my 2010 using the Mini VCI dongle i had. It "lost communication" about five attempts in a row, each time nearly at the end of the whole process, and I had to retry from the start. It finally happened to succeed on, I think, my sixth attempt.

The next time I had bleeding to do, I tried a different dongle and it all worked the first try.

Food for thought: "Mini VCI" dongles are likely to have problems because you can't buy real ones anymore. A company called XHorse originally made them, but counterfeiters copied them (right down to the XHorse name and packaging), and people buying them never cared about anything but the great price they found somewhere online, so everybody bought the counterfeits, the real XHorse had to give up on the product, and now the counterfeits are all there are.

That hasn't happened yet to the Tactrix dongles, but it could happen. There are definitely counterfeits out there, but Tactrix is still a real, US-based company that makes their own real product. It is about $170, and you can buy it at their website. You can find "Tactrix" dongles for fractions of that price, but those will be fakes.

So please help avoid making the same thing happen to Tactrix that happened to XHorse. It benefits our community to have a company out there that still develops and supports their product that we can use.

If you are sure you don't want to spend the $170ish for a real one from them, please consider saving money by buying a different, legitimately less expensive dongle (I hear good things about VXDiag, for example, around half the price), and not by buying a counterfeit of somebody's real product.

 

Indeed there is, and it is worthwhile even briefly to stay clear about what that discussion's topic would and wouldn't be.

Capitalism and economics give predictable good outcomes when consumers are selecting between legitimate competing products, such as the Acme Zorbatron made by Acme Inc, and the Peerless Wuffpler II made by Peerless Inc., and favoring the one they think gives better value.

There are equally predictable bad outcomes when some company that isn't Acme Inc actually copies and counterfeits the Acme Zorbatron and sells it as that, with the same name and packaging, to consumers who snap up the "deal" even though it takes no genius to figure out the thing they're getting at a tiny fraction of the real one's price isn't the real one.

The predictable outcome of that situation, if it happens enough, is the real Acme Inc (who actually knew how to design, improve, and support the product) has to exit the market, where nothing is left but the counterfeiters, who know how to copy and stamp out the things for cheap enough that maybe you can afford to buy 4 or 5 to get one that works right.

Avoiding that bad outcome depends partly on enforcement by the authorities of course (product counterfeiting being a crime, after all), but because the authorities can't be hovering everywhere all the time, it also depends on consumers using a bit of common sense to avoid buying the counterfeit goods.

In the case of the Mini VCI, it may be less important to lock the barn door now that the XHorse is already gone. But in the case of other suppliers that still benefit our community by knowing how to design and build products that work for us, it's still in our interest to be reasonably careful not to reward counterfeiters of their products.

Replied to your similar question on another thread.

 

Two Years after this post and I'm sure people are still running into this issue such as me not having any clue that paying such a cheap price comes at a steep cost. Had I known the cheap VCI was gonna give me a problem I would have sprung for a VXDiag instead. Is there a specific VXDiag you would recommend that stays at half the price of the Tactrix?