I’ve been around campervans my entire life.

My dad and I spent countless weekends camping in an old VW Samba - and just as often, we spent time broken down on the hard shoulder of the motorway, waiting for recovery trucks. Breakdowns weren’t an inconvenience; they were part of the experience.

Fast-forward to 2023.
I was travelling Europe for three months with my partner in my own VW Transporter. Somewhere deep in rural France, my van suddenly went into limp mode - at the worst possible time, in a very remote location.

I didn’t have an OBD scanner. I didn’t know what had failed.
After hours waiting for roadside assistance, we were towed to a garage in Biarritz. Unfortunately, it was lunchtime, and when the mechanic finally arrived, the language barrier made communication almost impossible.

He plugged in a diagnostic scanner, looked at the fault code, and repeatedly shouted one word at me: “Electrical.”
No explanation. No plan. Just frustration - on both sides.

Eventually, we were told to leave and go elsewhere.

Before he removed his scanner, we managed to take a photo of the fault codes. That photo changed everything.

I’ve been a mechanic since leaving school, with nearly ten years of experience, and I’ve always loved diagnostics - especially the hardest, most frustrating faults. I’ve worked my way up to Head Technician and later joined a diagnostics and tuning company.

From that photo alone, I could interpret what the code actually meant. I traced the issue to a broken wire going to the MAP sensor. A simple temporary repair - twisting the wires together -got us back on the road and saved the rest of our trip.

That moment stuck with me.

We had lost an entire day of our journey, sitting in a garage car park, sunburnt and stressed - when the fault could have been identified much earlier with the right data and guidance.

At the same time, back in the UK my parents weren’t so lucky.
Their VW Crafter - running the common 2.0 diesel found in many rental fleets - also went into limp mode. I was too far away to help. They waited, again, on the hard shoulder.

The fault was eventually diagnosed as EGR insufficient flow - a common issue that live data would have detected long before the breakdown occurred. If the system had been monitoring specified vs actual EGR values, it could have flagged the issue early and prevented the failure altogether.

That’s when the idea for Nomad Diagnostics became unavoidable.

Over the years, I’ve also seen another recurring problem inside workshops:
Customers rarely tell the full story - not out of fault, but because they don’t know what matters. Service advisors don’t always ask the right questions. And modern vehicles are so complex that missing context can dramatically slow diagnostics.

Nomad Diagnostics isn’t here to replace technicians - it’s here to support them.

By monitoring live data continuously, capturing environmental conditions, and recording the moments before and after a fault occurs, Nomad gives technicians the full picture. A clear, multilingual report. Confidence instead of guesswork.

If I had a system that gave me 60 seconds of data before a fault and 30 seconds after, my job would be easier - and I know many technicians would feel the same.

Nomad exists because breakdowns steal time, money, and memories - especially for people exploring the world.
I’ve lived that reality with my family, my customers, and myself.

Now I want to build something that prevents it.

-Josh, Founder of Nomad Diagnostics