What's the deal w. the Toyota ECU?

[cwatt]

As much as I love supporting URD, I can't help but be a little cross toward Toyota here. A friend of mine drives a 2009 GMC Sierra and had a $600 tune done on his truck. Factory ECU. Custom parameters. He told me they can tune just about anything into it too. He can basically make his dome light switch activate NOS if he wants to. So what's the deal with the Toyota ECU? Why do we have to go the way of piggy-back units? $600 and $1495 is a notable difference...


just bitching here; I've already pre-ordered my UCON


- Colin

 

[holddeez08RR]

Ford also has something like this. My buddy just got the Boss 302 and they custom tuned one of his keys to give the car more power. The other key reverts the car back to stock form. I don't know the details but it sounds pretty cool. Seeing as how Toyota has been lame since they ended the Supra, I don't see them doing anything like that in the near future.

 

[Gadget]

The Ford, GM and most of the other ECU are cracked. Some with help on the sly from the OEM.

The only aftermarket company that has gotten into the Toyota ECU without totally screwing it up is TRD. Their first attempt was for the Scion TC supercharger kit. They hired a former Denso engineer that got them into the ECU and they had their own code flasher thing that was included with the kit.

Then Toyota decided to help them out a bit on future projects.

There have been several aftermarket companies that claimed to have gotten into the ECU, but so far all of done nothing but screw it up. One guy was all over the Tundra forums claiming he could fix anything and every ECU that was sent to him had to be replaced with a new unit.

I have been dabbling at bit with ECU tuning on my car and it is taught me a lot. Mostly that there are tons of hacks out there that should not be doing this stuff.

There are upsides and downsides to this. The downside is you cannot make the ECU do something it is not designed to do, like run an additional injector, run in closed loop all the time and so on. Also, as we have seen with the TRD reflash you can have completely different results with the same calibration. Some truck run just right, some run super lean, some run super rich. Without custom on the vehicle tuning you can have results that vary. This is why the OEMs leave so much on the table as far as tuning so that these varied results don't result in a disaster.

The upside is that replicating a calibration file or software is super cheap, cost pretty much nothing to duplicate it. So if you were making a supercharger system you can save all the hardware cost as far as the ECU is concerned.

The advantage of something like the UCON is that you can take control of things and make things happen that the stock ECU could never do and with the self tuning, self correcting, and the fail safe guardian function you can add in a nice level of safety that the stock ECU cannot do. The downside is that it is not cheap.

In the end I think a combination of an ECU reflash and a secondary ECU will be the ultimate solution, or a complete new ECU that completely replaces the stock ECU and has all the CANN bus and other subsystems properly replicated.

G

 

[justin13703]

^ That and pretty much everything in the newer gm vehicles is connected via a can bus or data line, which is probably why dome light switches can be used to control nitrous. It basically connects to a computer somewhere, and when pressed, the computer tells the car what to do. Its not a direct connection between the switch and the lights. Thats why it can be programmed to do other things.

Dont be upset about it; that gm data system is garbage. It makes any little wiring job or problem into something that cant be fixed without hundreds of dollars and/or a trip to the dealer. Just to tap a wire to power gauges or something in those vehicles is a pain in the ass. A harness to replace a radio in one of those runs well over 100 dollars, where ours is 10. Toyota did it right, the less computerized the car is, the better.

A little side info, I used to have a Pontiac G8, and it was tuned the same way. About 500$, plugged into the obd2 port and could retune the entire motor AND transmission. I could change everything from what buttons did to how hard I wanted it to shift. Yes it was convinient, but like Gadget said, it was still a stock ecu, and didnt have near the capabilities or safety features of a piggyback. And id hate to even think of what the cost of a factory ecu was on those things if it ever kicked the bucket...

 

[Edgeman]

Ford also has something like this. My buddy just got the Boss 302 and they custom tuned one of his keys to give the car more power. The other key reverts the car back to stock form. I don't know the details but it sounds pretty cool. Seeing as how Toyota has been lame since they ended the Supra, I don't see them doing anything like that in the near future.

I think that's standard on all Boss 302 Mustangs. You get a regular key, and a "track" key. Believe one is orange, and the other black. No custom tuning involved, just a gimmic Ford came up with to tell everyone their Boss 302 is made for racing (Don't get me wrong, it does have a very good race package - Ford did well developing that automobile).

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/11/11/2012-mustang-boss-302-to-come-with-special-key-for-race-calibrat/


All of the Mercedes AMGs, BMW M-cars, Caddy CTS-V, Chevy ZR1 Vettes, etc come from the factory with all keys that provide 100% of the power of their automobiles. Just a gimmic from Ford...

 

[revobreaker]

My dad just got a Diablo intuner for his chevy truck:facepalm:

The thing just feels hokey and the touch screen controls are laggy and just lame. It is supposed to to a bunch of crap for the engine and trans, data logs, DTC, etc...

Ill save my money (and wait patiently for the plugs) for a ucon and then smoke him twice as hard:driver: