Nt 510 will register a battery. It will also read the battery histogram which can help you determine how long a problem has been going on and determine if something just broke or tree battery just slowly is dying.

It's a great tool to help determine for example: is the starter pulling too much current eg: of battery charges fine to 80% but car starts hard, it's most likely the starter not the battery.

I looked into the 644 and others but I found a website that showed a whole bunch of things that were done with the 510. If there is a better bang for buck scanner I'm not aware. I've added gm and will add Toyota soon.

It can be quite difficult to find the module containing what you need: example my wife's aux water pump isn't working but I can't find where to activate it. On my car I can find the activate option and the rpm of the motor. She has the 2000.7 model X5 which still had the 20 pin engine connector under the hood and I think the aux pump runs when it is called on. My 2001.5 seems to always run the aux coolant pump.

Her pump never is running I haven't figured out if the pump or the control/fuse etc is to blame. I finally found the damn thing so I can try to direct drive it and determine if the pump works. On my car I was able to find the active test function and just turn on the pump to confirm it works. Nojoy on mine.

So here also a thing: I had my inspection light come on and wanted to reset it before it's on too long and won't reset (this happened to me with oil light: don't go much past red oil light you can't reset it even the dealer had problems).

Anyhow when I used nt510 to reset inspection light it wouldn't work until I also reset oil service. (During reset function it asks to confirm reset then a second screen comes up: wish to [also] reset oil. If you choose no it did neither.

On my wife's oddball under hood connector the oil service reset didn't work I had to use a jumper in the connector.

On mine I didn't use the oil only reset function yet but with the post 2001 you can reset from the dashboard as long as you didn't go too far past the red light.

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2011 E70 • N55 (me)
2012 E70 • N63 (wife)