ecu mods--elec. boost controllers

[urquattro]

> I don't get why ia's mod would pass emission and some other mod wouldn't.
> please explain...when i last went to emissions they just bring it up to
> 50mph on the rollers. As long as they don't take it up to 1.4 bar, there
> would be no apparent difference. Maybe I'm missing yer point....

... Orin's point is that IA has gone so far as to receive a California Air
Resources Board (CARB) exemption.  This means that if for some reason the
smog nazis wanted to make an example of you and took apart your car to find
any non-approved mods, if you had an IA chip they would have no grounds to
make you remove it ...

Smog testing has moved beyond the original basic equipment check and sniff
the exhaust with a fairly small maximum amount of repair expenditure if the
car is in stock condition and yet does not pass the sniffer.  Now, if they
can prove that a component is malfunctioning (the flip side of OBD) you are
reequired to repair that part ... even if the car passes the sniffer test
...

All that said ... let's say that you had a TAP chip installed and you did
get called on the carpet ... as long as you had the OEM chip, you could
reinstall it and that should resolve any claim that could be brought.  In
fact it is good that IA's product is CARB legal ... since in many cases they
try to do sneaky things to prevent copying which makes it impossible (or at
least difficult) to restor the ECU to the stock configuration ...

... I did have one final comment about the aversion to switch to the MAC-11
because of the expense of the chip tuner mods ... sure if you want to shop
the big names you can expect to spend big bucks ... but there may be cheaper
alternatives.  If you were interested you could try an archives search for
QLCC ...

Steve Buchholz
San Jose, CA (USA)