For Ford Mustang MACH-E 2023 electric cars sold in Australia, New Zealand and the UK where the driver sits on the right, my photos below of the media review loan car I had, show that the car ODB / ODB2 / ODB II port is easily accessed in the open, facing the driver above the accelerator.
This is a much easier place to access than many cars which have the ODB port hidden pointing downwards where it’s harder to plug in.
An On Board Diagnostics (also known as ODB / ODB2 / ODB II) port can be used by the owner of an electric car to view live data about their EV as well as log and later analyse the logs to display useful information like graphs of fast charging speed, battery temperature, 12V battery voltage or a GPS map of where the car has travelled.
Once the Ford Mustang MACH-E 2023 ODB port is found you can easily plug in a wireless bluetooth low energy (BLE) ODB reader like my ODBLink CX.
I bought the ODBLink CX instead of other ODB readers because it is on the list of those recommended by A Better Route Planner (ABRP) who state:
“The OBDLink CX is high quality and works with ABRP (with the latest firmware installed). It limits the window when it is available for pairing, making it slightly more secure. The manufacturer even claims ‘Safe to leave plugged in’”.
ODBLink CX works well with the Car Scanner Pro (paid version) app for displaying live EV stats on a connected phone (my examples below) as Bjorn Nyland is well known for doing, as well as logging stats about your electric car driving, temperature, battery, charging data etc for analysis later.
A good ODB reader is especially useful when used with A Better Route Planner when pre-planning or in the middle of a long Australian road trip, as you can see in the examples below from my 2200km+ Christmas 2023 road trip in a Kia EV6 GT-Line media loan review car.
ODB Tips
In some electric cars you won’t be able to use your ODB port with ABRP or Car Scanner because the port is being used by your dashcam or a tracking device from your employer if it’s a work car or a leased car.
It’s great practice for security if you’re parking your car and going away to unplug the ODB reader or at least disconnect it from your phone.
In some brands of EVs if an OBD reader is plugged in and connected to a phone and you lock the car, the car alarm may activate a few minutes later, which is inconvenient and embarrassing if you’re at a servo to use the facilities.
The solution is to disconnect the phone from your ODB reader before locking the car.
Reader Darren has another tip:
Thanks for sharing your article. I have been using an ODBLink LX with ABRP for the last year with my Ioniq 5 and definitely recommend for those wishing to be better informed for range anxiety.
NOTE: for other readers of this article please be aware that if you use an ODB2 device with BLE that you have limited to no security against someone else connecting to your car.
The ODBLink CX at least shuts itself down when the car is not on for a period of time, others may not. I would suggest removing when you are not driving.
I chose the ODBLink LX for this reason as as it is full Bluetooth with connection security and not BLE. To use a full Bluetooth ODB2 scanner you will need to use EVnotify to send the ODB2 data to ABRP, so not direct like a BLE scanner.
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