My wife and I just purchased a 2005 A6. I have an antiquated scan tool that is in dire need of replacement. I was looking at the autel maxdas scanner from harbor freight, but I'm not sure if it supports VW/Audi software like a dedicated vag com scanner. I do a fair amount of work on cars and have different brands rolling in and out of my garage. In a perfect world I would love to buy a scanner that would cover all for a decent price but I feel that would be a long shot short of buying a $7000 snap on scanner. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

ECS Tuning sells a handheld vagcom scanner that would be well worth your investment. It's a couple hundred bucks but is capable of doing a tremendous amount of diagnostics and feature coding. What I would say though is to buy a USB to obd2 cable from eBay for around $30, download the free version of vagcom from Ross-Tech: Home and go from there. That shareware version does quite a bit (although not as much as the unlocked version available for purchase). Start there and if you find it doesn't meet your needs, you can buy vagcom for your laptop or order the vagcom scantool.