My name's Tadhg. I'm a teenager. I built Torq because my car's dashboard scared me and I couldn't afford a mechanic every time a light came on.
I drive a 2009 Alfa Romeo MiTo. If you know anything about Alfa Romeo, you already know where this is going. The warning lights come on constantly. Some of them matter. Some of them don't. I had no idea which was which, and every time I googled a fault code I got a forum post from 2009 telling me to "check the MAF" — which didn't help, because I didn't know what a MAF was.
The cheap OBD apps give you the raw code and leave you to figure it out. The expensive ones cost more than my car is worth. The free YouTube tutorials assume you already know things I didn't know. What I actually wanted was someone to explain it to me — not just dump a code on the screen.
So I built that. Torq connects to your car the same way any OBD reader does, but instead of just showing you numbers, it has an AI mechanic called Aldo who reads the actual live data and talks to you about it. What's wrong. How serious it is. What to check first. Whether it needs urgent attention or not. In plain English, not jargon.
It's a Windows desktop app. You plug a small Bluetooth OBD-II adapter into the port under your dashboard (every car made after 2001 has one), and Torq connects to it. You get live sensor data from the car — RPM, temperatures, fuel trims, voltage, whatever your car reports. And you can chat with Aldo about any of it.
Aldo runs on Claude Sonnet (Anthropic's AI model). He has a personality — he's a bloke who's been a mechanic for thirty years and doesn't dress things up. He's not perfect. He can't hear or smell your car. He's not a replacement for an actual mechanic on an actual ramp. But for "what does this light mean" and "is this worth worrying about" — he's genuinely useful.
There's also a graphing feature. You can record live sensor data while you drive and send the recording to Aldo to analyse. That's the bit I'm most proud of — it's not something other apps do, and it actually helps with intermittent faults.
It's not a professional diagnostic tool. It doesn't do bidirectional controls, DPF regens, adaptation resets, or any of the stuff a main dealer computer does. If you need that, you need VCDS, ForScan, or an Autel. Torq is for normal car owners who want to understand what their car is telling them — not for professional technicians.
It's Windows only right now. I know. Mac support is on the list.
Me. That's it. If you email support.torq@gmail.com, it goes to me. I'm not pretending there's a team. I'll reply when I can, which is usually within a day or two.
I'm not a registered company. I'm a developer and this is my software. The terms page has the legal details if you need them — written in plain English, not corporate legalese, because I hate that stuff too.
Questions, bugs, feedback, or just want to tell me your car's doing something weird — all of it goes to the same place.
✉ support.torq@gmail.comGoes directly to Tadhg. No ticketing system. No bot.