Tuesday, March 21, 2023
By Manoj Kumawat
Never Try To Get ECU Of Your Car Re-tuned From The Market
Modifying your vehicle from the market is entirely illegal in India, despite many car owners modifying their cars to make them look different from others. Although most of the modifications are made to exteriors, many try to modify the performance of their vehicle. This can sometimes not less than a nightmare for vehicle owners. The same incident happened with one of the owners of the Tata Harrier SUV from Kolkatta. A guy tried to remap the ECU of his SUV from one of the ECU tuners in the city.
Information regarding this was shared by one of the customers in the forum of Team-Bhp. According to the customer he took his Tata Harrier SUV for tuning it to Stage 1+. After long research, he found a car ECU tuner named “RC Tunes” having his shop in Kolkatta. The customer took his SUV to the garage in February 2023. There his SUV was connected with the OBD II tool by the tuner. The results revealed by the tool were horrible to know. It showed almost 22 error codes related to the ECU, Terrain Response System, ABS, Passive Entry & Start System.
Finding so many errors in the SUV, the tuner expressed his inability to tune the car and asked the owner to get them rectified from the OEM service centre. When the owner took his vehicle to the service centre, the technicians detected only 8 errors and rectified them accordingly. After fixing the issues at the service centre, the owner took back his vehicle to the tuner and asked him to connect it again with the OBD. Surprisingly, the OBD detected the same errors again, for which the tuner told the owner of the SUV and blamed him for rectifying the issues. He even talked to his tuning partner and discussed the issues with him.
After that, without suggesting to the owner to get the issues checked by the service centre he started tuning the SUV. He even didn’t care to inform the owner about prospective damages to the vehicle. He disconnected the SUV from OBD and connected it to his laptop to tune the ECU. After waiting for almost a whole day, the SUV owner left for his home in another car and got his car back around 11 pm. When he took his car for a test drive, he realised that the SUV wasn’t performing according to his expectations.
With a top speed of only 25 kmph, the engine wasn’t revving more than 1,600 rpm. Adding to it the multiple driving modes Sport, Eco and Normal were not performing well. When he told the tuner about all these problems he made himself from all charges saying that all these issues existed in the car before the tuning.
Finally, as the last option, the owner had to take his SUV back to the OEM service centre located about 25 km away from his home. There the technicians detected that the ECU of the SUV was severely damaged and had an open circuit. As it was under warranty they replaced the whole ECU free of cost.
This incident is a lesson not only for car owners but all vehicle owners to get any modification on their vehicle conducted either by the OEM service centre or through an expert technician.
