Hmmm... with barely a glance there appear to be plenty of development kits for can bus tools. Some are open source and some cost a bit of money but not large amounts. Many development kits even come with bread boarded as well as fully enclosed test systems.
Many many moons ago I remember researching a can bus architecture for an embedded project I was working on and I seem to recall at that time that many of the chip makers offered the tools (sdk and apis) as part of their chip purchase.
As can bus is very widely used I really can't say I am too surprised. I happen to be catching up with the Elio tour again this weekend in Charlotte and I will probably feel out Jerome Vassallo to see if EM may have any interest in this kind of project or would be willing to provide the documentation to make this project easier even if it would need to be sold independently.