Dealers can now see if your car has been remapped?

[Victor McDade]

http://www.bmwland.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&...


I guess it was only a matter of time. Tuners will no doubt be working towards a way around this however as it stands it would be brave to remap a car currently in warranty.

[pilchardthecat]

I'm sure they've been able to do it for a while.

They are probably now choosing to do it because the popularity of turbo diesel remapping means that the Mean Time Before Failure calculations (upon which the financials of the warranty etc are factored) are starting to become skewed.

[Mr Bimmer]

I have had two Friends take their mapped cars in for warranty work in the last fortnight without an issue. I reckon that car was already on the BMW database from the previous owner having a tuning box or something similarly obvious.

I can't see how a remap can be detected by a key reader.

[4rephill]

Mr Bimmer said:

I have had two Friends take their mapped cars in for warranty work in the last fortnight without an issue. I reckon that car was already on the BMW database from the previous owner having a tuning box or something similarly obvious.

I can't see how a remap can be detected by a key reader.

I wouldn't have thought it would be that difficult in this day and age, after all, some cars now only need the driver to have the starter card/key on their person to be able to operate car, you don't have to physically attach it to the car.

A remap works by altering the factory set parameters in the ECU, taking them away from the compromised settings that the manufacturers use and making them more extreme for performance gains etc.

All that's needed is for the key to be programmed to look for a factory set parameter from the ECU that always gets altered when a remap is carried out. If the key doesn't detect the standard factory parameter then it flags up an error message on the system and reports that the ECU has been tampered with.

I doubt it's that hard to do.

[mmm-five]

Maybe they're getting some information from insurance companies - assuming that all these owners of chipped cars have informed their insurance companies.

I for one would not buy a car that I knew had been chipped, as you just don't know what damage (if any) has been done to car - and no, I don't believe people do it solely for fuel economy reasons! But I bet most people on here would simply remove the chip before sale and sell it on to some poor unsuspecting punter without a jot of guilt.

Edited by mmm-five on Wednesday 2nd February 11:57