Probably depending on which 'Mini-VCI' they bought from which counterfeiter on eBay, and what their quality control was like.įrom the earlier research I'd been doing, it seemed that the only real, moderately-priced, USA-made option that you can still buy straight from the people who designed and built it is the Openport 2.0 from Tactrix in San Francisco. Sometimes they don't seem to have problems at all. I've heard that other people with Mini-VCIs don't have the same problems I had.

The counterfeiters drove XHorse right out of their own business.

The original Mini-VCI was made by XHorse, but I don't think you can even get an authentic one any more.Last February, I almost threw the Mini-VCI down a well the fifth time in a row that it 'lost communication with vehicle' 90% of the way through a brake bleed procedure that had to be restarted from scratch every time.Ironic, no? It would talk to all the fancy other ECUs in the car, but couldn't show me the engine rpm. It would just say 'lost communication with vehicle'.

With the Mini-VCI, I could never, ever get the active data list for the engine control module.

That really was helpful, and it has gotten me through all of the maintenance on my Gen 3 that I've needed to do over the last year. About a year ago, while I was feeling very indecisive about all the choices of cheap eBay dongles (mostly clones of the XHorse Mini-VCI) that might or might not work well with my car and Techstream, I was helped out by someone who had already been down that road, and picked out for me an old beater Windows 7 laptop and a Mini VCI and took care of all the installation for me.

Tactrix openport 2.0 99 eclipse