One of the cool features of Toyota's factory scan tool is that it will take a snapshot of data every half a second to show what's going on in the car.
When a code sets, it'll take a freeze frame shot and it'll show you three half second shots before and one half second after, so you can see what the vehicle was doing leading up to the code setting.
We have added this feature in all of our Snap-on scan tools. I'm going to show you how we get to it.
I already have a code in this vehicle so we're going to go into the engine and I'm going to go to where it says Freeze Frame here on the top right.
It's going to give me the codes and you'll see down here there's a little icon that looks like a film strip.
If you click on that, it's going to pull the data out of the PCM and it's going to be able to display it for us. It's going to give us a little bit of a description of what it's doing.
So once again, the ECM records engine conditions in the form of freeze frame data, every half a second, some codes will store five separate sets of freeze frame data.
So we're going to have three data sets before one data set when it happens in one data set after.
It's useful to simulate the condition of the vehicle around the time that the problem occurred.
We continue and then it's going to give us a description of what these PIDs are. Continue, and you'll see up on the top left here, it says it starts at freeze frame zero. So that's when the code actually set.
If I hit previous up there on the left, it's going to go negative one and it'll go negative two, and negative three.
And if I hit previous again it's going to go back to where we were and I can still go forward.
So I'll go to negative two, negative one, when the code actually happened and then a little bit after the code.
We can see here what happened after the code set.
That's a pretty handy little tool to help you in figuring out why exactly that code set in this car.