This does not involve flashing the manufacturer’s ECU software and in a way becomes an add on to it that effectively adds greater optimisation, tailored to your driving requirements. A typical ECU remap will flash all the settings set by the manufacturer and make the engine run on third party software which carries certain implications discussed further down below.Īs for the chip tuning box, it becomes the information transfer hub between the engine and its sensors, optimising the data supplied by the sensors, in turn altering the output of power and torque that your car’s engine provides. It is important to keep in mind that your car will log this change and these records will stay in vehicle’s history forever. This will be a permanent change in engine operation but one that can be at times rolled back if you visit the garage once again in the future. Now then, an ECU remapping option will require you to visit a specialist garage so they could rewrite the ECU software, thereby altering engine management beyond the boundaries set by the manufacturer, to reach more power and torque. This information is then used to alter fuel to air mixture and other settings that resultantly make for a smooth running engine.
So what does it all mean and what is an ECU?Īll cars these days run on engine management software and just like with your laptop, any kind of software requires an infrastructure to run on, which primarily is an ECU / microprocessor and the sensors that supply it with information. Once you’ve made up your mind that you definitely want to do something to add more power to your car, you will quickly realise that your primary and in a way most simple option is either a performance chip tuning box or an ECU remap.
The basics behind ECU mapping and chip tuning boxes