EEVblog #1181 - Car ECO OBD2 Fuel Saver SCAM!

not sure if this is something I ordered on eBay or not it's got one of these like straight from China you know with the free delivery to your one dollar item so not sure if it's something I bought it or something somebody has sent oh yes oh I remember I actually ordered this I have to do a video on now what this is is one of these Oh Dee b2 fuel saver things you plug it into your ody B port on your car and it's supposed to like talk to your engine management computer and do whatever to increase your fuel economy and somebody actually sent in an email for this because they saw it on like Facebook and all the scariest stuff is on Facebook and it cost like a fortune it was very expensive than a slick website and everything so let's actually look at this link that someone sent me and it looks totally scammy check it out and eco fuel choose your fuel type gasoline car look it looks at the exact one that we got watch this eco fuel check in three warehouses for available stock yeah I'm sure you are reserving your units because you don't want to miss out don't miss out yeah it's just an animated gif they're not really checking any of that it's one eco fuel at a 50% discount seventy-five bucks pay with PayPal how surprised they don't take Bitcoin bestseller to eco fuels plus one for free wow you're going to want to pony up the small amount extra for the hundred and fifteen smackers to get three of them when you can buy one for 75 bucks you get three for 115 regularly four hundred and fifty bucks three-year additional warranty look at this lock in this great price while you still can't Richard ah from it said like three people are currently in the checkout process and stuff like David M in Perm was just bought one eco fuel and these this just keeps popping up this is it's this hilarious but you can see why it just seems like completely scammy pay with credit card yeah I'm going to my credit card into eco fuel 24 pro someone just buy in geelong just bought five units then they claim all sorts of stuff a tree Maps remapping the cars computer after driving 200 kilometers it adjusts itself to the car according to the drivers habits and all that sort of jazz and a bit as it turns out um it was the real expensive one is exactly the same as this one I got on eBay for like five bucks delivered fantastic you get the pattern fruit anyone Bueller it's got the patent number I don't think so I expected just there to be nothing in there but sure enough they actually have it looks legit and they've rubbed the numbers off the micro there so you can't see everything and I have actually mapped out these pins on here and they are the correct pins 15% fuel-saving to you warranty fantastic this one's actually done by a company called Nikkei and also on the plastic enclosure as well and it is a complete and other scam it does not do anything at all instructions are really quite vague it just says press the reset button for five seconds I have to plug in then release the button just wait for a short while it'll communicate ask in stablished connection but it doesn't actually tell you that the button is actually hidden inside here behind here and there's one little hole for the lead but it's actually got three LEDs in there three indicators so I don't know look there's no other details in here apart from how to find your obd to connect us so yeah that's it mmm look at how many cars it's compatible with of course it is big as that doesn't bloody talk to him alright let's power this turd up and see what happens our 12 volt power is this pin here and it's supposed to be these two pins up here four and five but these aren't actually joined on the board they go off to different places we'll have a look at the board layout in a minute let's power it on and we've got our lids and it's actually drawing a fair amount jeez 50 odd milliamps and who put that on there you can see the LED through there but you can't really see the other one so you know it's really pretty dodgy you can see like it's trying to connect even though we've got nothing hooked up to it it's just flashy flashing and like there's no instructions as to what that means but like you know to the casual observer it looks like this is doing something and if we hook it up to just a can bus demo that's outputting like just a demo signal it does exactly the same fleshie flashing granted this is not going to simulate the data that's inside the car but it doesn't matter because this is a complete scam and there's another actual bus in there which is called the K line which is on the two pins next to it and that's an older system I believe I don't know the exact details but the canvas is the modern one now it does actually seem to have like different modes you just saw in that video clip where it actually turned this LED off and it did that for a while then it switched it back on and then the yellow LED in the center here would like come on for like five seconds and then turn back off for like 20 seconds and now just magically it's come back on and it's connected I guess because they don't give you any instructions even though I've got a completely fake can bus here and of course if you disconnect it it makes absolutely no difference so it does the same sequence regardless of whether or not it's sitting here with no cane connected whether or not it's got like just some sort of data pulsating on the can bus or whether or not it's in your car so here's the can bus on my Toyota Corolla I just under the dash here I'm just going to plug it in and I'll see if it does any difference in the little lights show that we got and that's with the ignition off all right let's turn the ignition on so I press the reset button and it's doing exactly the same sequence as what's on the bench the ignition is on so I'm following the instructions and it does diddly-squat anyway oh wait a minute and if I start the car up it's gonna do exactly the same thing so the way these scams work is that they give you a fake little light show there and they pretend that it's connecting to something when in fact it's not it's doing diddly squat because how do you support all these different you know dozens of different model and brand cars let alone all the different models with all their different ECU's and everything else it's completely not a and they combined up with some you know slick marketing to make you want to buy the thing but even for five bucks to live it on eBay it's still ain't worth it because it doesn't do anything it's not even talk another computer yellow LED is now switched off and it will hopefully come back on for the yet there we go comes back on flashes for a little bit it does exactly the same sequence as what it does in the lab surprise surprise oh look look it connected it connected in quote marks now canvas is a differential signal which is actually terminated with a hundred and twenty ohms on either end and if we have a look at the can signal that we're actually generating here it's just a testing tool you can see that here's the ground here and it's centered around two-and-a-half faulty and that's your positive and negative line there just a classic differential signal see direct opposite so the can device in this case our little fake fuel saver has to actually listen to the bus and then try and do arbitration on the bus to be heard and then to be able to once it does that it actually transmits something so how can we be sure that this thing's not talking to the can buskers really we'd need like a proper ECU connected or a accurate ECU emulator and we'd need to sit there and monitor this in real time over a fairly decent length the time to see if it actually transmits anything to the can bus at all well we don't need that because let's take a look at the board okay here's the height can high and can low pin okay well it might look like they're routed out look at this that's going through a 10k resistor here over to a pin this one the negative here is going through a 10k resistor over to under there somewhere it's got to be connected to a pin doesn't it well the first thing is that you don't put too 10 k's in series on a can bus its terminated in a hundred and twenty ohms on the bus lower than that because it's like each end or whatever so like it's just not even if this thing wanted to drive the cam bus and could it couldn't do it because the two 10k series resistors wouldn't provide the drive capability in order to go under the bus but have a look down here let's just should we zoom in a bit closer wha-wha-wha the silkscreen is over the pad that there is no solder on that pin at all it is not connected because the pad was not exposed and that is the that is the line leading to the can High Line half of these pins aren't actually connected to the board so you don't need a simulator or any monitoring at all to know this thing just physically cannot connect to the can bus it's a scam so they're actually doing a rather poor job at this I'd at least would have connected it to the can bus even if it didn't do anything cuz then you would really to debunk this thing and call it a scam you would have to as I said monitor that can bus in real time have a a simulator or emulator or whatever for the ECU and you'd have to see that it actually did it actually transmitted something and that's actually quite a complex and involved thing to do especially if you want to you know test it over hours because it might sit there monitoring for hours but yeah gathering all this data and only then might it actually start talking to the ECU and trying to program something but I'd like they didn't even go to that sort of effort so I didn't know why they even why they bothered with this sort of complexity at all it's just ridiculous but they've deliberately this is done at the PCB design level you deliberately mask over those pins so they're not even connected it's just nuts I've got a five volt regulator here a couple of here to drive the LEDs and that's in a button to do a fake reset on the thing and it just goes through a lightshow sequence that's it just designed to con people into thinking that it's connected it doesn't even show these LEDs like it's only got the one hole for this letter here it's just an absolute boondoggle over the device the problem with this sort of thing is people want to believe in this sort of stuff it's like the audio fool audio file you know products that don't do anything looks like if you pay like five thousand dollars for an IEC power cable to hook up to your amplifier so that's going to increase the soundstage in the presents and all that other then trust me you're gonna hear the difference because you paid five grand for that thing you will hear it likewise if you pay for one of these fuel saving devices there's a very good chance that you're going to see some fuel savings because you believe in it and that's you're gonna like your mine's just gonna go oh yeah it's like it's giving me an extra you know mile per gallon or whatever I'd convert it for you Yanks their liters per hundred Kay's here because they don't do controlled proper controlled testing they've got no way to actually back that up so you'll get the positive reviews on the website there will be a few negative ones as well of course but people just ignore those and look Joe Bloggs got like an extra couple of miles per gallon or something like that so it's got to be a winner it's got like four stars on Amazon or something and of course the company will add in fake reviews as well and it's just they can't do anything not even connected so it doesn't even like monitor the can bus for like signals so that at least changed it when you turn the ignition on light sequence is just the same either way well so don't fall for these scams when you see websites with the look and feel like the one we showed at the start you just know these things are a scam now and that's I said it before there might be genuine ECU things out there that can actually and I know there are people out there who modify you know their ECU by writing various things you can clear errors and do all sorts of things that might help improve it and I'm not saying that's not possible because hey the manufacturers do it right it's all it was part of that emissions arm scam thing where they would have different modes and they've reprogrammed the ECU to pass the emission standards and stuff like that so you know it is possible but these devices here are a complete and utter scan they're not even bloody connected unbelievable so don't fall for it anyway I hope you enjoyed that video and found it useful if you did please give it a big thumbs up and as always you can discuss down below let us know if you actually do this legitimately on cars because I'm sure I know that there's a lot of my audience who do automotive stuff and things like that so you know it certainly is possible but not with one of these unbelievable catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 588,960

Keywords: eevblog, video, car fuel saver device, fuel saver scam, scam, fuel saver buste, eco fuel saver review, eco fuel obd, eco obd2, eco obd2 fuel saver, eco obd2 scam, audiophool, audiophile, nitro obd2, obd2 bus, can bus protocol, homeopathy, audiophile power cables, scam warning, scam alert, car fuel saver, can bus, obd2 hacking

Id: XgXwfBTKLGU

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019