Davis Instruments 8226 CarChip Pro

Parents, if you put this in your kid's car, you will learn a lot about their driving habits. It shows braking harshness, speed, rapid speed increase, if any, RPMS, coolant temp, and even the Check Engine Light. You can even set it to beep at a certain speed, and it will beep until the car gets under the desired speed. (Ex, if you set the limit at 70 mph, it will beep as soon as the car reaches 70, and doesn't stop beeping until the car goes back down to 69mph). I do recommend configuring settings with the computer. Have the speed update every second (default is 5), and everything else to refresh at the fastest rate it can. It holds a lot of data, and you can export and save the data on it. Great product.

First, the unit has been replaced with a newer version called the CarChip Pro (which is what I got). While the first unit I got was faulty, they shipped a replacement immediately - an A+ for their customer service.I got it for a series of uses. I am considering switching over to an electric vehicle for our commuting use (best alternative with high gas prices, oil wars, climate change, etc), so I first wanted to really dig down into our typical driving so that I can figure out the right choice for us.It is a "plug and play" unit and the software is extremely easy to use. Literally, just plug it into the OBD-II port. Pull it out and plug it to your computer and press a button to download the data into the CarChip software. Then plug it back into the vehicle.Saving the trip data to a CSV file is relatively easy for a single trip. But to do it for several isn't - one has to keep repeating this for every trip. Bummer.I created an Excel file with some formulas for deeper analysis. I found that on our city commute trips we use engine power for only 40-50% of our trip duration (the rest is either idling or coasting) - we are excellent candidates for commuting using electric mode only (either an electric vehicle or electric mode only in a plugin hybrid)!! To put in another way, we are wasting gas for at least half of our trips.My area is hilly with plenty of slopes - some steep but most are mild. So I now tried "saving gas" driving techniques in our compact manual shift car (2002 VW Golf). Been doing that for about 4 weeks now since my last fill up. And no, I am not driving like a "little old lady" - just preserving momentum well and using gas judiciously. I've logged my driving over the last month (Apr 2008) and got 37 MPG!! That is significantly over the 23-24 MPG I got before I changed my driving style - a 50% gain. So I expect to recover my cost in just a couple of months.So after a few months my need for the CarChip is almost nil, right? Well, not really. While one can continue to use it to monitor car usage, mileage, etc, it can also be used to get an insight into the computer error codes and take action before it becomes too bad.The unit retains the last 20 seconds of speed data in case of an accident. So it can be used to advantage. However, I am not aware of the validity of the data from a legal perspective, a good lawyer should be able to use it to "win the case".The unit also captures hard/extreme braking and acceleration. While hard/extreme braking is required in certain circumstances, it should be minimal/none for a good driver. Both are not good for gas mileage as well. This information can be used to improve driving style. Since my older one will be of legal driving age in a couple of years, I plan to have this unit in his vehicle for the first few years to help him improve his driving habits.While it is a no-brainer for fleets, it is good for the average family too.

I bought this unit to diagnose an issue with one of my cars and to also serve as a training aid for my son who is a new driver. It works as described and proved to be very useful in troubleshooting my car. I would give the device 5 stars if the software were better but it needs work.You review each trip as a separate graph. Also each graph only has one parameter on it such as speed. This limits the ability to use the software directly to analyze the data by comparing two measurements on the same time axis.To do any real analysis, you have to export all of the data to excel which is not a simple process but instead involved cutting and pasting the numbers.

I have had the CarChip EX for several years. The CarChip Pro is the subsequent model but not fundamentally different from the CarChip EX. The strength of this product is that it monitors 4 parameters but that's also it's weakness. Four parameters is far too few with the biggest problem being that it doesn't report fuel consumption at five second intervals as it does things like engine speed and car speed. If it just had this, I'd rate the product with at least 4 stars.As for the software, it is a bit simplistic but useful. It doesn't fully comply with Windows standards because if you bring up a log file, whether you want to save any changes or not, they are saved. This is true for software builds up through 2.3.3 at least.The unit seems to be very durable. I've been using mine for years so that's a plus but it's been a long, long time since Davis Instruments has done anything with this unit and that's a shame. I would love for them to allow us to monitor several more parameters. Above all they need to do a MUCH better job with fuel consumption information. If they did, I'd buy a new unit immediately.Finally, the claim for the product is "CarChip Pro with Alarm records every second of every trip, up to 300 hours of driving data!". This is patently false. I relied on this information during a trip to Vermont and back and when I checked on the memory, I found that CarChip Pro was saturated and writing over data that I needed. To record 300 hours of driving data at one second intervals will require several times the memory that comes with this unit. To put this unit's capacity into perspective, I recorded 26 driving events that included 634.1 miles and 14.271 hours. That required 140.3 KB or 26.77% of the CarChip Pro's memory as reported by the unit itself. That indicates to me that the unit can record just 53.3 hours of driving at 5 sec intervals. This is an area where Davis Instruments has let the unit fall behind the times. It has the same amount of memory that the CarChip EX that I've used for 12 years has. With memory densities of modern memory far greater than it was 12 years ago, there's no excuse for not increasing memory capacity to allow 300 hours of monitoring at one second intervals as they claim.I'll stick with the CarChip Pro because it does allow me to download data unlike the Scangauge products but my opinion is that NO ONE has introduced a product that really does the job.AS OF 01-JAN-2018, Davis instruments that produced this product has dropped their automotive line of products. The CarChip Pro will not be available for long.

The first one only lasted 6 trips before it "fried". Called tech support and they said they'd send out another one right away. That's good! I'll write more when that one gets here, for now, it didn't work.