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Maybe two years ago I was looking for a summer holiday book when I came across an unofficial biography for Dr. Ferdinand Porsche by Nikolay Nadezhdin and immediately found myself fascinated with the whole story.

To be honest I was never a true Porsche fan before that – I never understood the fascination with what Jeremy Clarkson referred to as “Glorified Beetles”. They always seemed somehow wrong, product of a horrible historic time on Earth and generally not good. If ever I liked any Porsche related car – it was never a 911, rather the 924, 944 and 928 seemed better. I wasn’t too fond of Porsche enthusiasts either – they seemed to be too full of themselves – claiming that air cooled are better than water cooled ones (when they are not) and they can take ages boring you to death with the history of the “Metzger” engines and subtle differences in washer thickness between M96 and M97…

But it was then, while lying on a beach, listening to the Black Sea when I finally understood the 911, Porsche’s mindset got under my skin too and I am now converted, I saw the light. Hallelujah!

Working at Abrites has many perks, one such perk is the ability to experience hundreds of cars including many super cars but mostly cars outside my tax bracket by a country mile. Anyway, my point is that NOTHING comes close to the feel of a modern Porsche – like that Sting song about the car thief I smell the leather, look at the stitching and automatically revert to making grunting noises like a badger in heat as soon as I step into one. They are great and you will not get similar quality this side of a Bugatti Chiron.

So here I was – fresh back from this year’s summer holiday, ready to get back into work after two weeks of fantasizing of starting my own car company like Ferdinand Porsche or Colin Chapman (you know how the mind wonders when you go on holiday) when I was pleasantly surprised with the task of checking over one of the last “prototypes” of the Abrites diagnostics for Porsche. I went to the company’s test garage, AVDI in hand and… badger noises... a 992 Turbo S, in black, dark brown leather, tons of Porsche Manifaktur options, and black wheels. It was no GT2 RS but I’ll take it. “Just a poor boy in a rich man’s car”. 

So, let me tell you about what you are going to see moving forward. Now that the Abrites diagnostics for Porsche online already exists you can rest assured that our development for the Zuffenhausen brand will be focused there. For the moment we have started with the basics – a large support list including the latest models from 2022, very good and understandable standard diagnostics, and coding features available for you to experience. Here is what we have:

•  Model identification up to 2022
•  Module identification
•  Reading and clearing diagnostic trouble codes
•  Live Data display
•  Coding features

This to me is a great improvement because the user experience with the Abrites diagnostics for Porsche offline was starting to show its age in that regard and I believe what we started doing now is a quantum leap forward. From here on we can only promise you that we will keep improving the online Porsche platform the same way Porsche themselves improve the 911 – adding new features and updating, repairing what needs to be repaired and make it better with every new version. Only a lot quicker because we need to be able to compete with other tools, including Porsche’s own tools in order to provide you, our customer the best user experience when working on any modern Porsche.

The most important thing we tested in the version you now have are our coding functions. These include all possible modules we could find and when you scan a car there is practically no modules you will not see coding for. Now, I need to put this disclaimer here and let you know that we provide you the abilities to perform coding, to change the values in the modules so that they behave differently. BUT you have to know that changing the values inside the modules must be done at your own risk and the values changed may require you to make additional software and hardware modifications to the vehicles you are coding. There is a very good option here which allows you to make a backup of the curent coding values of all the modules and in case something goes wrong during your work you can always go back to where you started.
I want to spend a bit of time talking about some of the coding features we went through while testing.

We had the 911 Turbo S and we also had a Cayenne Turbo (just laying around) where we tested the following coding features:
•  Multimedia coding
•  We tested the ability to enable and disable the parking assistants;
•  We tested the rear hatch opening and closing using the car’s remote;
•  Rear camera module allows you to setup the 360 degrees view and we have full control over it.
•  The Instrument panel testing was also interesting and helped us understand a few more details – we change the model designation without an issue to swap from a Cayenne Turbo to a Cayenne Turbo S.
•  Sport chrono activation and deactivation are also available from what we have tested.

We basically tried absolutely every coding option we could and were successful with them. We also took the liberty to compare our coding to comptetitors and AVDI and Abrites Diagnostics for Porsche Online was the only tool which was able to successfully code the 360 degree cameras of the Cayenne.
We used two different very popular tools when running the comparisson and I personally felt that the most comprehensive and complete Porsche coding solution was AVDI.

In conclusion, I must say that although I am strongly biased towards AVDI and the Abrites Diagnostics for Porsche Online I can call our solution a fully functional coding tool which does what no cometitor can and in my opinion it is shaping up to be the best alternative to the OEM solution.

Now, as we reach near the end of this week’s blog where I told you how I saw the light in terms of Porsche and especially the 911 it is my true hope that by experiencing our latest solutions for Porsche vehicles you too will see the vision of our developers and get why we want to do things our way – the only way we see fit. Porsche decided to start putting the engine in the wrong place on cars and got a lot of criticism for that but they kept with it, continued improving, and now nobody can argue with their results when the 911 slays vehicles twice its price with no “ifs, whens or buts” and want to thank you for believing in Abrites because this is what we want to do, too – continue making tools for you which give this power in your hands.

Until next week, my friends. Enjoy working on cars and keep getting better. We will try to do the same.

Alek