How to find out if a used car has been remapped
Discussion
God to know the types of car likely to have been quietly remapped to avoid them. Presumably if you buy a car that's been remapped without you being aware of it and you subsequently have a prang, your insurer will invalidate your insurance on the grounds that you really should have known better?
Chromegrill said:
God to know the types of car likely to have been quietly remapped to avoid them. Presumably if you buy a car that's been remapped without you being aware of it and you subsequently have a prang, your insurer will invalidate your insurance on the grounds that you really should have known better?
Legally it's all 'to the best of your knowledge', however how that all plays out when it comes to a claim is anyone's guess...Watchthis said:
Although BMW figures can be conservative
If you read enough posts on Pistonheads then you learn that every manufacturer ever is conservative with their 0-60 times, to the point that you wonder why we even bother having it on the specs.Germans are well known for their devil-may-care attitude to quantifiable numbers, after all
Acceleration runs aren't a particularly good way of ascertaining the absolute power of a car - too many variables. You can get a surprisingly broad deviation on 0-62 times of the same car with the same driver, if you measure it I'm enough different places at enough different times.
OP, manufacturers tried to prevent remapping (or rather, people remapping, blowing the engine then flashing back to standard and doing a warranty claim) by introducing a flash counter. However, all the remapper outfits these days claim to reset the flash counter, which would mean that no, there is no easy way to check if a vehicle has been remapped. However, if the stakes are high enough to make it worthwhile, it is possible to show if a vehicle is currently running a non standard map by side by side comparison. I'd suggest that idle curiosity isn't enough of a stake. If you are worried about insurance, you can just get it flashed to standard by a BMW specialist.
If you are thinking "I want a remap on a leased M140i but don't want to have to buy the car when they find out" then you may get away with it if you don't brag about it all over YouTube, Insta etc. (There was a YouTuber who did that with a leased BMW then cried salty tears when BMW wrote to him to invoke the "if you mess up our vehicle then you have to buy it at full RRP" clause.)
Edited by donkmeister on Thursday 2nd March 00:38
Rooted said:
Use a £5 Bluetooth dongle and the Torque app to see what the peak boost figure the car pushes out. Compare this with what the stock peak boost level should be.
s94wht said:
Take it to a tuner and they should be able to read the ECU
Both of these are good options, that will answer your question.There was a post recently about someone who bought a mapped car from a main dealer that borked the engine. I left the thread when it started going off track and do not know how things ended, but the dealer was avoiding any warranty claim because an aftermarket exhaust had been fitted since purchase.
I’m not suggesting that will happen,- just that it has happened before.
I use a knock off delphi diagnostic computer (£60 from many online chinese businesses). It has a screen that shows if the ECU has been flashed and how many times. It's a brilliant pro level tool so if you ever need anything in future (wind back electronic calipers, access to abs/airbag/modules etc) it would be worth a little investment.
If you are familiar with similar cars, the answer would be “ Drive it “. The late Lawrence Pomeroy rightly said, “ if you have to measure an improvement, you haven’t got one”.( He was Chief Mechanical Engineer of Vauxhall, then Daimler and De Havilland.)
Edited by Lester H on Friday 3rd March 18:19
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