The cost of a cheap remap

Audi A3 2.0 TDi Remap - Copy

The cost of a cheap remap

The cost of a cheap remap

 

So here is the story. It is not an untypical one that we hear. In fact not a week goes by without a similar phone call.

Adam calls – He has had his Audi a3 2.0 TDi remapped by a friend of a friend and now the car doesn’t start – It sort of turns over, catches and stalls out with the dash coming up with the message SAFE

Trying to write back to the original read and the car just throws his tool out

No problem we can sort that as long as the “friend” can send us a copy of what he read out of the car before he wrote the modified file

Confirming we have got that we will go out to the car – No point trying to do anything via the OBD port so out comes the ecu and read the data direct from the Flash, Eprom and Micro – In this case it was a Bosch EDC16 ECU so fairly easy to drop a BDM probe on it to read

Audi A3 2.0 TDi Remap - Copy

Then we open the file and compare to the software on the ori file read with the cloned eBay mpps tool and compare against the software he has written from his CD of modified files bought on – you’ve guessed it eBay

Hardware numbers match but the software is for a VW Golf with the same engine – Laughably amateur  – On closer inspection we can even tell this is a ripped off version of our own remapped Golf software – how can we tell, well tuners all have their own slight idiosyncrasies in how they write improvements into the software and this had all the hallmarks of one of our files.

With some delicacy we write the file back to original status and reload this onto the ecu, reinstate the ecu in the car and it starts first time, not even an immobiliser defeat so everything again works as it should.

Now we take the ecu back out and write a modified file to the ecu with correctly modified software specific to this car and again reinstate the ecu, this time resealing it to stop water ingress.

A test drive confirm the car is running more powerfully and with improved throttle response and we are on our way

The cost to the customer – Double what he would have paid us for what should have been a simple OBD remap

What we have done here recovering these mistakes is not blowing our own trumpet – Any decent remapping company with a full selection of genuine tools and remapping software can do this if they have the knowledge. But if your quote for a remap looks too cheap there is probably a reason for that – Remapping equipment is not cheap, the skills to perform remapping are not learned overnight, choose carefully!

 

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