2001 Maxima will NOT talk to scanner via OBD-II port...what gives???

As mentioned, I have a 2001 Maxima/Minima GLE model. Great 24V 222hp motor, only it drinks a bit too much gas for my lead foot daily driving (17-23mpg depending on roads & if I'm late.)

The car currently has 198/500k on the clock and I can't for the life of me get it to talk to a scanner. Have tried 3 different ones at different Advance Auto Parts as well as my coworkers. If it matters, all scanners are the orange ones that Advance sells and rents for free.

The car will run on 4-6 cylinders depending on its mood. My experience at a VW / 0000 shop tells me it's a coil or 2 (the 1.8T Bosch units were total POS's, VW finally went back to their original A4 etc supplier, Hitachi.) but it's hard to pull the wires to test as the intake manifold has to bloody be removed to check the rear 3 cylinders. Also, quite often, if I give it a foot full o' throttle, it'll clean itself up and the miss will go away. I've already replaced the TPS with a junkyard unit as I figured it could be the culprit. No dice!

Thanks

i think some cars share there OBD2 power with the cigarette lighter power, I would start checking fuses

It's a VW prototype kidding, I have no idea. Loved my Maxima and would love to pick up another one day so this thread is of interest to me.

Does the scanner power up? Usually the cheaper ones use the power from the plug to operate. If it doesnt turn on you have a power/ground issue at the DLC.

If it does turn on and you cant communicate, you have a CAN issue.

Eithet needs fixed before you get too far down the parts replacing path.

I had a similar issue when using an older OBDII scanner on a newer vehicle. It turned out that my scanner didn't support the CAN protocol. Because you've already tried a bunch of scanners, I'd start with the fuse, as edizzle89 mentioned.

No, the scanner does not power up. I replaced the fuse with new this afternoon even though the original looked fine and the cigarette lighter worked, just need to eliminate variables. (That and find out which coils I need to replace as the back 3 are underneath the upper half of the intake manifold making coil testing a BIT difficult on them.). Or perhaps it's another issue. But the car smells like it's running rich and that seems like bad coils.

If it matters, they were all Actron brand scanners. I'll go back to the auto parts store tmrw for a retest but I expect the result to be the same. (I also already sprayed lots of contact cleaner on the OBD2 port, BTW.)

All of these are the cheaper flavor and I was told they're powered by the port. What is the DLC?

Thanks

logdog wrote: Does the scanner power up? Usually the cheaper ones use the power from the plug to operate. If it doesnt turn on you have a power/ground issue at the DLC. If it does turn on and you cant communicate, you have a CAN issue. Eithet needs fixed before you get too far down the parts replacing path.