From a plate to a torque figure, without touching the phone.
Cogged is a voice you talk to while your hands are busy. It works out exactly which car you have, guides the job one step at a time, and reads out figures that carry the manual they came from.
Five things happen, in this order
Getting the right engine, not the right badge
Most of what goes wrong with car advice happens here. Two cars with the same badge, the same year and the same engine size can take different bolts at different figures. Get the variant wrong and everything downstream is wrong with it — confidently, and in your ear.
You read out your registration
DVLA gives us the make, fuel, engine capacity and first registration date. It does not give us the model, so we do not guess at one.
Your MOT history fills in the rest
The model, and — more usefully — the mileage recorded at your last test. That figure drives every distance-based service interval. Advisories from the test become jobs you can ask about by name.
If the variant is still ambiguous, it asks
When several engine codes fit what we know, Cogged says so and asks you to read the code off the block. It is thirty seconds with a torch, and it is the difference between a figure for your engine and a figure for one that looks like it.
Your plate never appears in a log or a web address. A registration identifies a keeper, so it is treated as personal data from the moment you say it — stored encrypted, indexed only by a one-way hash. The privacy notice is specific about this.
One step at a time, and it waits
Steps arrive one at a time and never advance on a timer. That sounds like a small detail until you are under a car with a seized bolt and a voice in your ear has moved on to step nine without you.
Before anything that puts you under a raised car, into a brake system, near fuel, or across a hybrid’s orange cabling, Cogged reads the hazard aloud and then stops. It is not holding the instruction back to be careful with you — it genuinely does not have it yet. That mechanism is worth understanding properly.
When the figure arrives
A distinct tone plays, the specification appears on screen, and the number is spoken twice in both units. Two feet from a running impact wrench, once is not enough. The card carries the manual and the section it came from, so you can check it yourself if you want to — and on anything that holds a wheel on, you should.
Three options, filtered to what fits
When a job needs a part, you get three: something local and quick, the genuine item, and an upgrade — each filtered against your resolved vehicle rather than a keyword search that happened to match your model name.
Where the fitment data is not certain enough, Cogged says so instead of showing you the part anyway. Selling somebody the wrong brake pads because a price feed matched a string is the exact failure this is built to avoid.
We earn a commission on parts, and we say so every time. What we will not do is order the list by what pays us, or invent a reason the cheap one is unsafe. If the budget part fits and does the job, it is on the list saying so.
Before you start
- A phone
- Propped somewhere it can hear you. You will not need to touch it once the job starts, which is the entire point.
- Axle stands
- Rated for the car and on solid, level ground. Cogged will not talk you under a vehicle held up by a trolley jack, whatever you tell it.
- A torque wrench
- There is little point in a sourced figure you then guess at. For some procedures Cogged asks you to confirm you have one before it begins.
- The right consumables
- Stretch bolts that must be replaced rather than reused are flagged as single-use on the card, because a reused one fails later, at speed.