Sorry about the crosspost, but I own a Pontiac and a Subaru, and this topic is relevant to both anyways.
So I recently got myself an OBD-II car code scanner cable for my laptop, and during research I found out that all cars after 2008 will have to be CANbus compliant. They made a big deal out of specifying what cars prior to 2008 are already CANbus-capable. I didn't want to have an obsolete tool for any future cars I might buy, so I looked up what the differences were between CANbus and OBD-II. After reading up various websites about CANbus, such as this one:
Basically, all I wanted to know was how does it affect me? Do I need a new cable to connect to the car, or do I keep using the existing OBD-II cable? My feeling is that nothing has changed, and that they just added a few more codes to the standard OBD-II codes (the P0xxx codes) and the proprietary manufacturer codes (the P1xxx codes). I think all they did was add some additional diagnostics codes to check whether network connections are working between the components on a CANbus, but the format remains the same. The additional codes are the Uxxxx codes, as listed in this link:
Yousuf Khan