The car would be down for ~3 days with the ECU pull, ship, flash, return ship. Pulling the ECU is not that hard, with the 6MT it's more of a pain due to the shear bolts that are on it over the DSG which has none. APR is currently already working on a couple of things:
- Switchable programming for 91 oct, 93 oct, 100 oct, stock, and valet mode (speed governed and drastically reduced power), able to be done through manipulation of the cruise control stalk.
- Stage 2 tune with a new smaller pulley on the supercharger for some minor HP gains and some decent TQ gains down lower
With the switchable stuff, you won't get to change things yourself or make your own maps, that is scary to me - most people would screw their car up badly trying to do this, I prefer to let the pros do it and give me the end, usable product that won't grenade my engine or tranny.
Like wwhan said, the ECU is tied to the chassis, so it would be ~1500 - 2K for another one for the car according to what APR said when asked about this.
Originally Posted by
wwhan
Well there is this company, Eurocharged, but nobody seems to be able to provide info on the B8 S4 ECU tune other
than they need direct access to the ECU. These guys have been doing Mercdedes tuning for a few years. I guess someone will post results eventually. Some of the people came from LET Motorsports. The ECU tuner is Jerry Thornton.
I'm sckeptical till I see something concrete. I know this took APR a lot of time, money and manpower to do, so if they have cracked the ECU code, it's weird that they used such a hard ECU to make a name for themselves in the Audi community rather than one easier. APR has always been VW and Audi, so it doesn't seem odd they were aggressive on this front. If it's a piggy-back I am even more skeptical after seeing what MTM was able to do (or not do in this case).
Originally Posted by
unique1
All speculation and nothing more. Speaking to an APR dealer, I was told that they have no access to the code whatsoever when doing a tune. Unless the ECU is physically altered (did you open your box and look?), there is no reason why it can't be flashed in the vehicle. As far as intellectual property, every tuned ECU out there is available to some smart bastard to decode it. That's the way I see it, but I'm only speculating too.
For all flashes the APR dealer network does, this is true, but since no one other than APR itself is doing flashes of the B8 S4, kinda moot to compare what the current dealers know to what is done on our ECU, it's all speculation other than what APR itself has said, which is "you can't do it through the ODBII and we don't want to allow flashing at dealers until we are certain our code can't be lifted by competitors." As for the competition paying to get an APR flash then reverse engineering that - good luck. APR uses the same on board SIMOS encryption that keeps everyone out right now, to secure their code once it's on the ECU. I believe it's 512bit or possibly even 1024bit encryption, I don't recall right now.
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