Autel TP100 Brilliant and Great Value.

Autel TP100 Brilliant and Great Value.
I had previously owned a Scangauge 1, but it went faulty and after a lot of chasing back and forth, the customer support basically said I would have to pay to get it repaired. Given the cost of a repair, against the outdated interface, I decided to give the Maxitrip TP100 a try and if it wasn't any good I would sell it on and buy the newer Scangauge 2. I didn't hold out very much hope, but I thought for the cost it would a reasonable clone of the Scangauge 1.

How wrong was I? My Maxitrip arrived with really good instructions about setting it up and teaching it to learn gas mileage and other functions like setting up engine capacity etc. Much like the Scangauge, but the unit is definitely not a cheap clone from China (although it is made over in China). There are extra functions and the menu is really intuitive once you have a little time to play about with it. You can also teach the unit to show your chosen live data in each of the four "corners" of the display.

After a week or two of driving and following the instruction manual, it is returning really valid live gas mileage information, proving the calculations I had done in the past that go against the vehicle manufacturers figures (2006 Opel Vectra 2.2). It even looks good sat on the dash. My only criticisms are that the display is not dimmable, as I do a lot of mileage on unlit roads, but the white LED backlight is not overly intrusive I would have liked to have the display dim with the dash light adjustment (I am not sure if this is possible on a tool like this, Scangauge doesn't do this either, maybe something for the developers?) and secondly, the right angle diagnostic port connector is quite chunky and deep. Don't get me wrong, the lead is really well made, but I had to move the port on the car to hide the lead (although I had to do the same with the Scanguage). Is it really necessary to over-engineer these parts on a tool that should rarely move from car to car?