The Cadillac ELR is a plug-in hybrid car with a bit of class, it has the beating heart of a Chevy Volt in a nice coupé body with some up-market styling and a nice interior. Since it wasn’t on the market for long and some consumers are still wary of cars with electric motors, it also represents something of a sweet spot: according to [Andrew Rossignol] you can pick them up for less outlay than you might imagine. He bought one, and being an inquisitive soul decided to probe its secrets through its OBD-II ports.

OBD-II sniffing is nothing especially new, but his write-up provides an interesting run-down of the methodology used to identify the different proprietary pieces of data that it makes available. His Python script attempted to parse the stream as though it were multi-byte words of different lengths, plotting its results as graphs, It was then a straightforward process of identifying the graphs by eye that contained useful data and rejecting those that were obviously garbage. He was able to pick out the figures in which he was interested, and write an interface for his little Sony VAIO UX to display them on the move.

We’ve covered OBD hacks too numerous to mention over the years, but perhaps you’d like to read our history of the standard.