ECU REMAPPING FACTS

THE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE REMAPPING YOUR CAR

A reputable remapping company will provide you with a dyno sheet for your vehicle to prove the output they are claiming and will return your car to standard without charge, at the time of the remap, if you are not happy with the results.
A reputable remapping business will keep your original calibration – and restore it free of charge at any time for warranty reasons or at time of resale.
An investment of many thousands of pounds is required for the correct equipment. Many people offering remapping use a £5 CD available on the internet.
It takes years of training and experience to correctly re-tune a car as well as access to factory inside information. Our technicians have to keep abreast of modifications to all makes and models.
Having your car remapped by an amateur or someone who is not sufficiently qualified and/or does not have the right equipment may DECREASE performance and INCREASE fuel usage as well as damaging your engine.
It is impossible to provide a proper remap via a mobile service with no dyno or proper equipment for testing purposes. Surely no serious tuning company has no premises to work from!

THE HIDDEN DANGERS OF DIESEL TUNING AND REMAPPING

A few things to consider before purchasing a remap. Having been in the business of recalibrating O.E. Engine management systems for over 15 years, we have been watching the market change with a mixture of disappointment and dismay. It is an unfortunate fact of life now that there are many products on the market that give anyone with a little computer knowledge access to the engine run calibration stored within a vehicle’s ECU.

This was always going to happen as all manufacturers, now allow ECU recalibrating via computer so that faults can be ironed out at dealer level and options can be added to the car without factory intervention.

The problem is, you can easily go online and buy yourself a relatively cheap tuning and remapping programmer that will both read and write the file in your engine management system, which means if you had the means and know how to edit it, you could alter the way the engine runs. This is where the problems have started to arise as not only can you buy the hardware, you can also buy files on a CD that claim to offer the same as the professionals do. These CD’s often have some 10,000 modified ECU’s files on them, and all for only £4. Does that sound like a professional has made them to you?

Generally speaking, these files have been stolen from one or another company over the years and been compiled onto CD/DVD. Are the files good? Nobody knows… will they kill your engine? Well, we sure won’t be finding out as we wouldn’t dare use one on your expensive engine, but sadly lots of these people have done just that and the manufacturers are selling ECU’s, engine’s and transmissions like hot cakes as a result!

We feel it was worth writing this page to make you aware that the reason for the sudden drop in market price of this product is owing to the number of companies that have suddenly popped up, claiming to be experts at remapping engine management systems! It is usually quite easy to spot them – just start asking some searching questions about how the maps work and you will soon find out if you are talking to a man who knows a little bit about computers, or if you are talking to an industry professional. The former will change the file in your ECU for one found on a CD purchased online. An industry professional will calibrate the file for your particular car and as a result can tweak it to perfection, ensuring all security and chassis coding is retained.

Some so called “calibrators” couldn’t even tell you the correct AFR for full load use, let alone how a torque limiting map actually works and why you should just maximise all values within it… why these people think its acceptable to just increase calibration tables to max without knowing what they do just because they read it on the internet is anyone’s guess, but every industry is the same really, if people can make an easy buck, they will and its always at the end users cost.

At the end of the day, this is a high technology industry that requires constant re-investment in tooling and skills due to the sheer pace of the technology utilised on modern vehicles. Anyone diesel tuning or remapping at O. E. level as we are needs to be constantly retraining and have access to the best tooling and software that money can buy, and it cannot be bought with mere thousands, you need to invest tens and ultimately hundreds of thousands.

BEAR THIS IN MIND

15 years ago your average car like a Sierra Cosworth had a mere 40 tables of interest to calibrators and around 50 calibration switch points for equipment and parameter coding. Today, even your average family diesel has in excess of 1000 calibration tables and tens of thousands of data switch points. How do these fly by nights know which tables need changing, and by how much? How do they know what the tables do and what the effect will be? Will the increased boost cause turbo problems? Excessive EGT’s? Premature head gasket failure? Will the increased rail pressure cause problems with the injectors? (Especially on Ford TDCI’s) The Pumps? The lines? We have seen ruptured fuel lines here caused by some idiot raising a common rail pressure by an extra 100bar because he thought it was an extra 1.00 bar of boost. Incredible!

When a professional does the work he will start with your OWN original file and modify a carbon copy of that one so that all immobiliser and chassis information is retained, as well as any updates you have had installed from the factory such as personality settings and bug fixes etc… you end up with your own file, tweaked for more power/economy etc and access to your unaltered original calibration back at any time should you need it and that is the ONLY way vehicles should be tuned.

The cheap remapping file fitters normally install files supplied to them for prices as low as £5 by an expert!! with 20 years experience tuning from his living room and with no dyno or idea of how the maps in the ecus actually work. They simply make everything bigger adding 10, 30, 100 percent to the values in the hope of getting a result.

We have seen cars not even idling properly after a remap and the customer has been told to drive it for a while to let it bed in!!! after which the so called tuner no longer answers the phone or answers angrily saying all their maps are tested and nobody else ever complained. On examination we found the car to have three changes made to maps which simply never need to be touched such as idle fuel quantity with the fueling richened up at idle to the point the car was stalling. None of the maps changed had any effect on performance except in a