Quote:
Originally Posted by wparsons
What if you flash back to the OEM ROM, can anything be detected as tampering then? I remember reading about the flash count not being updated by the EcuTek flashing process so you can flash between tunes and stock as much as you want but the flash count wouldn't be effected. I've also read that some tuners will update the flash count as needed in case the ecu was flashed by a dealership.
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I haven't used every development tool or dealership tool for every manufacturer, not by any means. What I can say is this.
If there's an accessible "flash count" on an ECU, I've never seen one. I'm not saying they don't exist, but it's not something you'd ever look at unless you were interested in the hardware more than anything. It's not part of the day-to-day process of using commercial tuning tools on production ECU's. If I want to see whether someone has changed values in the ECU, I can use the built-in comparison function for the tuning tool. It's a pretty simple affair: compare the calibration in the vehicle to the production calibration that's supposed to be in it.
If somebody wants to claim warranty on a dead ECU, and the ECU goes back to the ECU manufacturer, and the manufacturer sees that the ECU has been flashed 500 times, then maybe somebody would mention that in a report or something. Most likely it would end up in the warranty claim guy's Excel spreadsheet used for tracking such things.
Now if there's already a TSB saying x customers are doing y modifications and breaking things, well that might be a different story. The TSB could conceivably involve a procedure for checking to see whether the ECU has been reprogrammed. Think about it this way. If the customer is modifying the programming in the ECU, then breaking things as a direct result of that, and then trying to stick the OEM with the bill, well the OEM has a vested interest in preventing that. Of course determining fault and root causes isn't always straightforward.