Thirty seconds on what that sheet is, where its data comes from, and what we don't claim.
The report was generated by Root Cause Mechanic, an app the vehicle's owner runs on their own phone with a Bluetooth OBD-II adapter. Everything on the sheet is read from the vehicle itself — stored and pending trouble codes, live sensor data captured over real drives, and the maintenance and repair history the owner has logged — each item timestamped when it was read, not recalled from memory at the counter.
We don't sell parts, we don't sell repairs, and we earn no commission on anything the owner buys. When the report says something was ruled out, there is no financial motive behind that — ours or theirs.
The score at the top of the report has exactly four values, and the honest one is the fourth:
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| Urgent | Stored trouble codes are present. The app tells the owner this needs diagnosis — it does not guess at severity beyond that. |
| Needs attention | Something is waiting on this vehicle — overdue maintenance, an open recall, or pending codes. |
| Good | Nothing urgent in the data on file. A claim about what was read, not about the whole car. |
| Unknown | Not enough data to say. The app never converts silence into a "Good" — if it hasn't read the car recently, it says so. |
The app organizes evidence and ranks likely causes the way you would triage: what the codes and sensor data support, what they rule out, and which cheap test would separate the remaining possibilities. Its job is to have your customer arrive with evidence instead of a guess.
It does not replace the person with the car on the lift. It cannot hear a bearing, smell a clutch, or see a wet gasket. Anything without an electronic signature is invisible to it, and the app says so rather than pretending otherwise. The diagnosis is yours — the report just means you start from data instead of from "it makes a noise sometimes."
Trust your eyes — and know the raw evidence is a tap away. Every line on the sheet traces to a timestamped reading in the owner's app, so you can ask them to show when a code was read or what the sensor data looked like on the drive where a symptom appeared. If the vehicle tells you something different today, the car wins: codes age, conditions change, and a report is a snapshot, not a verdict.
We're a small operation and this page is young. If you're a shop and you'd want more from it — a way to see a customer's shared history directly, service records that flow back to the owner as shop-verified, or just something this page should explain better — tell us: admin@rcmechanic.shop. What shops ask for is what gets built next.