DEALERSHIP DIAGNOSTIC TOOL FOR ANY CAR (+ Candy Crush???)

This is the MUCAR 892BT, a dealership level scan tool that works on literally any car you can throw at it, but also one of the main selling points appears to be the fact that this thing can play Candy Crush… I know, it’s a bit mad, but this is actually one of the most capable, and yet still relatively affordable, bits of diagnostic kit I’ve seen, so stick around as we have a look around this thing and see what it can actually do – Candy Crush and all.

Let me give you the highlight reel. This thing is compatible with 120+ BRANDS, THOUSANDS of different vehicle models, it offers lifetime free updates, has both diagnostic and coding features, and 35+ special functions like battery coding and service resets. It even supports the newer CAN-FD and DOIP protocols for newer, or BMW, vehicles! On top of that, you get Deepseek support built in, the DollarFix community, and a selection of apps – namely YouTube, a PDF Reader, and, yes, Candy Crush. 

Physically this thing is pretty well built. It isn’t super heavy, but it’s solid, and with the rubber overmolding it’s easy to grip and hard to damage. I’m sure some people would take that as a challenge, but still. You’ve got a 8 inch touchscreen on the front, a power button up top along with a USB C port for charging, and a USB A port for accessories – we’ll come back to that in a second – and on the back is the Bluetooth OBD reader dongle that’s magnetically attached. You’ve also got a built in kickstand that works really well for resting it at an angle. Inside is basically a pretty low end tablet. A quad core ARM A53, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, and a 4150 mAh battery, and that all runs Android 10. For context, Android 16 is the latest, 10 is from 2019 and has been out of support since 2023, so I guess it’s a good thing this is a pretty locked down version of an Android tablet with such a limited selection of apps! Just to get it out the way, yes, you can install Candy Crush, and it even plays fine, but realistically the only use for these apps is Chrome and YouTube to be able to look tutorials or guides up when trying to diagnose and fix a problem. I can’t imagine reading audiobooks through the kindle app on my diagnostic tablet. 

Moving on to the actually useful stuff then – the accessories. In the nice hard-carry-case you get an ethernet cable, an OBD extender with an RJ 45 breakout (for BMW E and F series cars, I think mostly for programming, but still), and a USB to ethernet adapter. You also get a nice USB C cable and a basic yet remarkably high power USB wall charger (2.5A at 5V). You can also get an optional extra endoscope for, at present anyway, £37, and a TPMS reader for just under £100 right now. Oh, and the unit itself comes in around £450 – some places like Aliexpress or ebay with a coupon code are closer to £400 although from ThinkCar directly it’s £464.14 with a discount right now. Weirdly it is actually cheaper if you want it shipped to the USA, so there’s that. Considering this does all vehicle brands, that sure sounds like a pretty great deal. Most tablets like this either offer only a couple of brands and cost like £200, or charge extra – and often subscriptions – for additional brands. The fact that this does every brand (including newer brands like BYD of all things) AND gets free lifetime updates… That sounds like a decent value to me!

As for actually using the thing, well that’s pretty easy. Pop the dongle into your car and let it scan away. Much like the Launch X431 I reviewed last year, this thing’s UI isn’t the most friendly. While the home screen does look great, once you get into the diagnostic mode and connected to a car, all the icons and nice designs go away in favour of a text-only list of options. It does scan every single module in my 2013 Audi S4 – luckily for me my car is (at least currently) in good working order with no error codes, but much like VCDS you can enter each module and get data readouts, do actuation tests, adaptations and have access to both basic and advanced settings, and even long coding. Unlike VCDS the UI for all of this is… less than friendly. There’s no tooltips to tell you what stuff does, although that’s more prevalent in the special functions. At least when viewing the basic settings there was a decently descriptive list of functions you could run – testing everything you can think of really. In theory this can do anything VCDS can do, although with much less guidance and hand-holding you’ll likely spend a lot of time referring to the Ross-Tech forums and guides just to get stuff done. Much like the Launch scanner, my specific car model only has limited support for special functions, which is a little annoying. 

I did also test this in my friend’s twice CAT N’d BMW F10 5 series – which has permanent error codes – and that was pretty interesting. First, the scan options are different depending on what brand you’re scanning. In the BMW you can do a ‘rapid’ scan, a ‘smart’ scan, a ‘system’ scan, or pick which module to scan. Rapid is the one you want as that seems to manage to multithread search every module for errors, whereas ‘smart’ seems to do the same thing, but slower. The ‘system’ scan just… scans the modules? It doesn’t return error codes, even if there are some. In my Audi though, the options were, ‘high-speed scan’, ‘smart scan’, ‘gateway scan’, ‘system scan’ and ‘choose’, where the ‘high speed’ is the same as ‘rapid’ for BMW, as is smart and system, and gateway is a VAG specific top level ‘hey do you have any errors, if so how many’ quiz of the modules, rather than actually opening each module to find what the errors are. The fact there are even options for ‘system’, ‘rapid/high speed’ and ‘smart’ is a sign of that lack of explanations. There’s no tool hit or help to explain – although now is probably worth talking about that little blue support icon in the top right that’s permanently there – even during Candy Crush! That is basically a permanent live chat support window you can ask a question about the device and someone will get back to you remarkably quickly. While that is nice, I can’t imagine having to have someone on the other side of the planet tell me what a button does, just because the UI is so bad that it isn’t self explanatory. Obviously the support is a nice feature to have available, although for how long it’ll be available is a very hard question to answer. 

Another terrible UI experience is the live data view. In the table view it’s fine, you can select the things you want to see, all is well. You do have to go into each module to see each module’s data, but still. But if you graph it? Man that’s a terrible UI experience. You can set min and max values – sorry you can try and set min and max values, which you’d think were for the graph scaling, but no it just puts two bars on screen that don’t do anything! If you want to zoom in on the data you have to pinch and zoom, but it only works occasionally. The sample rate is also about once per second, so if you’re looking for little transient issues this won’t be much help. I also didn’t see a way to record or save that data for looking at later. You at least can save and even email a PDF of the diagnostic codes to yourself (or a customer if you want to go that far).

Oh, the final “new” feature that this 892BT offers is AI. Yeah. So this comes in two forms, one looks useful – but isn’t – and one is literally just a Deepseek chat bot. The chat bot is tuned to provide car mechanic advice pretty well, although without specific information from vehicle manufacturers it’s pretty general information. “Check this”, “look for that”. It can’t provide car specific information. The other MUAI tool is what looks like a full diagnostic process, but it is pretty generic information. For my friend’s non-operational parking sensor DTC, it says to check the plug connections, ‘refer to the circuit diagram’ (that it can’t provide), or replace it, then a blurt of text about parking sensor errors. The ‘reference image’ is listed as “coming soon”. The “Circuit system test” is empty, and the maintenance guide is what you’d get if a high school student had to write 500 words when given the sentence, “ultrasonic sensor open circuit or short to ground”. Honestly the most useful feature is the damn “google” button. 

To be clear, this is an amazing bit of kit. A comparable AUTEL unit is likely a grand or more, so this is a great value, and if you work on a lot of your own, your friends and your family’s cars, this is an amazing investment. The fact that it can diagnose and tweak any car brand on earth is pretty sweet, and pretty seamlessly too, is amazing. The AI stuff, and the UI, need a hell of a lot of work. This is not an enjoyable user experience for anything deep – sure, it can do it, but with such little information you have no idea if the next button you press will literally brick your car or not – it just isn’t enjoyable. Despite that, I could see myself buying one of these things, especially if I was maybe a little neighbourhood garage rather than just a hobbyist. It sure seems like a great value, even if it’s annoying to use.