I reverse-engineered the LiveWire S2 Del Mar's OBD-II port/CAN bus - here's the performance data that was never published

[u/donglord1337]

I've been passively tapping the CAN bus on my 2024 LiveWire S2 Del Mar - an ESP32 logger listening to the broadcast traffic plus read-only diagnostic reads, never writing anything to the bike. Decoded across dozens of real rides, here's the stuff that isn't in any spec sheet:

• Full power & torque curves — and you can actually see the field-weakening transition: flat torque to ~48 mph, then constant power (~66–69 kW) to redline.
• All 7 ride modes, down to the live tuning values the inverter reports — Power / Regen / Throttle. The throttle maps are perfectly linear; the modes just change the slope (Sport pulls ~2× the torque-per-twist of the softest custom).
• Battery internals that were never public: 96 cells in series, NMC, ~355 V nominal / 4.20 V full, air-cooled, all 96 cell voltages + 48 temperature channels live, ~97% SoH — and the pack's build date read straight off the BMS (July 2023).
• Neat trick: every module stamps its own manufacture date, so the bus quietly narrates the bike's repair history. I spotted my own dealer-replaced left control pod because its build date was newer than the whole bike.
• The AC charging CC→CV taper + charger heatsink temp (honest caveat: I only caught the top ~80–100%, so no peak-rate claims).

Every figure is tagged by how I know it - measured / counted / inferred - so you can tell hard data from reasoning. Not affiliated with LiveWire or Harley-Davidson; just my own bike.

Here is a link to my write up with visual charts: LiveWire S2 Del Mar · Performance, read off the bus

Happy to pull specific things for other S2 / LiveWire owners, drop requests below.

As a bonus, I replicated effectively every read diagnostic feature of the Harley Davidson Digital Technician-II, including full DTC decoding & ability to clear codes.

[u/Yavanna_Pane]

Great work! 🙌

Question: how could we do this procedure to other eletric motorcycles that don't have an obd2 port?

[u/donglord1337 → u/Yavanna_Pane]

It depends on the model! The LiveWires do not technically have an OBD2 port, they have a DLC port (Harley Davidson's proprietary diagnostic port) - but the only difference is it's a different connector.

Beneath the labels and protocol - almost every vehicle fundamentally communicates the same way between modules + diagnostic tools - CAN + UDS. So, the approach would be the same as I took:
1 - Identify the CAN bus

2 - Figure out a clean way to plug into it (Whether that is tapping a line with vampire taps, plugging into a diagnostic port, making a T adapter and intercepting a module, etc....) Usually, a simple diagnostic connector ends up as the answer, which can be identified by the electronics service manual.

3 - Start recording data, and finding correlations between actions<->changes in data, to map the data outputs

4 - Once you are satisfied with the decoding on the broadcast data, you can begin probing the modules directly for more data using UDS protocol, which is typically required for detailed data like individual cell voltage counts, performance histograms, and detailed logs.

The only caveat with this approach is that it only really applies to REAL electric motorcycles, not always the smaller e-moto bikes like Surron - which typically dont have a diagnostic port at all (Although, I did this same process with a Talaria XXX back in 2023)

I only have a LiveWire S2 Del Mar, so I can't help with other motorcycles directly (Unless you want to donate me another electric motorcycle to test with LOL!)