First, to address the elephant in the room. I am receiving a small commission If you buy a product via my link for most products I have on this website.
This commission is not added to the price you pay. The price you pay stays the same if you buy with my link or not.
You can read more about my affiliate partnerships on the affiliate disclosure page.
How do I compare & test products?
On this website, I test mostly OBD-II scanners and unlike a lot of other similar websites I actually test products not only crank out comparison tables in 5 minutes without having used the products first.
I test based on hands-on experience
Most scanners I review personally, some are reviewed by colleagues from OBD-II scanner stores but I always make recommendations only after having real hands-on experience mostly by me and occasionally but some of my cooperators.
This is an example of my doing “Best Bluetooth OBD-II scanners” and “Best ELM327 adapters”.
Some of them I can get for FREE through my affiliate partnerships but a lot of them I bought with my own money to help create the best review possible.
I am trying to sell some of them to get at least some money back, but most of the time my worktable looks like this:
That is because there are a lot of categories for OBD-II scanners & other diagnostic tools so I always have to keep getting new tools to stay relevant and produce the best recommendations for you.
I am buying & lending cars for testing
I even buy some older cars and use them as test vehicles.
You can see them in photos and video reviews on my YouTube channel. I also ask friends to lend me their newer cars to test out some special functionality or use my own car.
Some cars are destroyed for testing
Some of the cars are even putting their own life to help us find out which tools are best 🙂 For example my Kangoo, I took the whole engine wiring + ECU from it to do some testing & experiments.
Testing OBD-II scanners is not easy as apart from basic tools, the functionality differs from car to car and to be honest, there isn’t just one scanner best for everything.
Some are better at certain brands, some are better for some special features and it requires a lot of real experience & testing to provide you with helpful honest reviews which is what I am trying to do here at Iamcarhacker.
Be aware of AI reviewers
AI is getting popular and it will not change in upcoming future. There are already a lot of OBD-II scanner reviews on YouTube where to me it’s clear the person making the video just took Amazon’s description for products and just let AI make a review video.
But there isn’t any testing or any real experience behind this, they usually just make hundreds of videos like these in a month without any value for you.
I believe AI is the future of OBD-II scanners and it will help you solve your codes based on live data analysis.
I even have some parts of this website where AI helps me, but I use it more as an assistant to help me transform my real experiences, testing results, and research into reviews and helpful articles.
You can read how I use AI on this website in my AI Policy here.
Meet the main tester & founder
Hi, I am Yuri (short for my name, I started using it because people outside my country have trouble memorizing my name :D).
I don’t have any professional automotive training but I always work jobs that require having my car always ready and functional otherwise I couldn’t make money.
Soon I realized that if you don’t know anything about cars you will have a hard time servicing an old car as you either get scammed, get your car even more damaged, or if you finally find a good mechanic you have to wait 1 month for service.
So I started to learn about car diagnostics and it grew into testing diagnostic equipment on this website.