One of the surprising things about the FL2 is (according to my dealer) that it does not always store the error codes. When we problems with our 11 reg and the car would not start or when we had the "reduced engine performance" message come up (resulting in the car going into limp home mode until stopping and then restarting) no error codes were stored. The way it was explained to me was that if the vehicle has an error code and the problem goes away then the code is deleted. Can you believe this?

What a great forum. We read it here first.
Prepare for the newspaper headline "Mechanical Dimensia Epidemic" to sweep the country after the current "weather bomb arctic blast" tripe has worn thin.
Maybe the errors are redacted on grounds of National Security or embargoed under the 50 year rule to prevent political embarrassment - was Tony Blair in anyway involved I ask?
In any case we clearly need a far reaching Inquiry to get to the bottom of this scandal, in say 10 years at a cost of a few billion squids to secure earnings growth for hard working families of Law Firms.

dorsetfreelander wrote:

One of the surprising things about the FL2 is (according to my dealer) that it does not always store the error codes.

Now now, don't be sarcastic...

There are a variety of fault codes and types some clear when the fault clears, some don't. That's legislation (OBD) for you

All faults that lead to showing a message on the dash are stored.

All fault codes have some maker (the status of fault code) associated with them like: Permanent, Intermittent, Pending, Historic, etc.
In short these could be explained as follows:
If that particular code appear, until is marked as Permanent, the ECU need to test it to see if it's appearing again.
And this testing is done on certain conditions that could not be, at a certain moment, met. Therefore the Pending marker.
And that code could appear from time to time - so not always - and therefore the Intermittent marker.
But a fault code that appeared sometime and after that, not appeared anymore for a certain period of time/ignition cycles is marked as Historic.

That tester could filter the fault codes and show you only the Permanent ones.

Therefore, use a tester that's making use of all 4 bytes of an fault code.
2 bytes - fault code,
1 byte - fault subcode
1 byte - status of code.

All described in detail in ISO15765.

 

With modern electronics it would be easy to have a running log of all fault codes with the last 30 days or so many messages stored on a rolling basis. Can you imagine Airbus or Boeing getting away with this?