I purchased a 2013 Ford Escape a few months ago. There is something plugged into the OBDII port with a thickish cable that goes back behind the dash somewhere. Disconnecting it doesn’t seem to affect anything, except that the connector and cable get in the way of putting the cover back on. Does anyone have any idea what it might be?
Google only gives me hits showing how to locate the port. That’s not my question.
Some insurance companies, Progressive pops to mind, offer discounts to people that essentially allow them to monitor their driving behavior. These devices typically plug into the OBDII port. Perhaps one of those?
There are also devices you plug to the OBD port in that allow you to use an app to monitor your own car information, though those are usually dongles that hang right there, not cabled under the dash. When the car is first turned on, see if you can identify any bluetooth devices trying to pair.
I wonder if the place you purchased it from is tracking your car for some reason.
I already checked for bluetooth devices. The only bluetooth signal is to connect my phone to the SYNC system, and unplugging the mystery cable didn’t affect that. And wait a minute –
[goes out to the car to look at the connector and see if anything’s printed on it]
I just did something I hadn’t done before, got on my back under the dash (not easy at my age and condition) and discovered that it’s some kind of extension cord. Apparently someone put it there so they could access the port without removing the cover. Kind of weird because it’s harder to reach than the actual port.
I use a bluetooth dongle in my car to stream data to my phone when I’m on the track. In another of my cars, the same dongle hangs sticks out far enough that I risk hitting it with my knee when I move my foot off the clutch. An extension cable that made the OBDII port less convenient by moving it farther away from my knee would actually be handy for me.
I’d be super interested to trace that cable and see what it’s connected to. As per the others in this thread, almost all of the OBD dongles I’ve ever seen are self contained and don’t have wires going elsewhere.
You can, for instance, have an Android tablet on your dash connected to one of those bluetooth OBD modules to display ancillary gauges or other real-time engine data. Prior to bluetooth those would be hardwired to custom displays or double DIN head units instead of off-the-shelf tablets. 2013 seems a bit late to not be wireless but it’s possible that the PO had something like that set up and didn’t feel like retrieving the extension cable for an outdated piece of tech.
Some car loans require a OBD/GPS tracker to make sure they can repo the car if they need to. I don’t have any idea if this is applicable to your purchase, or even an earlier one.
I’d not use that cord. Cords and plugs can appear innocent but contain data collection devices.
I paid cash. But the Carfax report said it had been repoed from the previous owner. It’s possible there had been a tracking device that was later removed. But it seems like it would have been really simple to defeat just by unplugging it.
I was going to say that I’d never heard of a GPS tracker that plugs into the OBD port and it would be dumb because defeating it would be trivially easy. Apparently they exist though. This could very well be what it was for.
And if this car was previously repo’ed, good chance it was previously sold by a buy here, pay here lot that installed a tracker. I’m now pretty convinced that’s what it was for.
Even a trivially-disabled tracker like that is pretty useful if enough people don’t know about it.
In my state, 30 days after you buy a usaed car, you need to have an emissions inspection, which is done by plugging a scanner into the OBDII port. If the buyer doesn’t know the tracker is there, they won’t even know to plug it back in. I doubt the emissions testers will bother to do it. So, best guess, in my state, this tracker would work for the first month.
Is the ODBII bracket broken or loose in any way? I had a car where the bracket broke and the port was just dangling by the delicate wires. I got an ODBII extension so the end of that would stick out the bottom and the original delicate port was safely tucked away. I didn’t want mechanics to be handling the original port and risk breaking it. Technically I don’t think the inspection stations are supposed to hook up to the extension, but I never say anything about it and neither do they.
In your car it seems weird they would tuck the extension away rather than just unplugging it and removing it. If it used to have some sort of tracking device attached, I would think they would remove the cord and tracker at the same time.
I would think secret trackers would be hardwired and hidden somewhere. They don’t need the ODBII info. They would just need 12v for GPS tracking and cell phone upload. The ODBII port is a convenient place to do that for consumers, but car lots would likely use a more robust solution.
If it’s part of the loan I doubt it’s a secret to the customer. “Leave this tracker installed or the contract is void and we’ll repo the car.”
I had no idea this was a thing prior to this thread, but apparently it’s big business on buy-here-pay-here lots. Per that article, some dealers " [offer] a free removal service once the loan was satisfied, as they did not want to be tracking paid-off cars and could reuse the devices in many cases." That certainly doesn’t sound like they’re keeping these hidden.
You think the emissions testers wouldn’t replace the thing they unplugged? I bet most of them would.
If I installed some analytics thing on my car’s ODB port and the emissions guys just left it sitting unplugged I’d be pretty annoyed at them.
The trackers aren’t secret. That’s my whole point. It’s like an Elf on the Shelf. They only really work if the target knows to fear it. If the customer both knows about the tracker and disabling it is trivial, it’s not doing much good.
If you installed some analytics thing, you would know to plug it back in. If you didn’t plug it in and didn’t know about it, you wouldn’t notice if the inspector left it unplugged.
Does your Escape have the 2.0 Ecoboost that was available for that year? If so, the previous owner could have been using a tuning module. Some use the ODBII port to grab engine data. They may have removed the module and left the wire plugged in.
How is collecting data about your engine useful?
From the little I’ve seen and heard of the repo business, there are a lot of people that don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, don’t realize someone else is making payments on a ‘gift’ vehicle, or just don’t think clearly enough to remember and disconnect a GPS tracker. Also I doubt that the contract paper work says ‘easily disconnected GPS tracking device, follow steps A, B, C to remove’, it probably just says something like ‘a GPS tracking device will be installed’ so the user might not even know it’s easily unplugged. I think they probably catch a lot of people with that cheap device even if it is pretty easily disconnected.