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Comment by dchest | Hacker News Reader

> When buying a car, don't we get the keys of the doors and a way to open the front cover where the engine lies?

You don't get the "keys" for ECU, unfortunately.

Cars to computers always seems to be a poor analogy. But you can replace the ECU with one of your choice. In fact, there is an industry designed specifically for getting better performance from your car by customizing the ECU.

Isn't this the same thing as the Cyanogen mod?

That's more like buying a different phone. You don't have access to the internals of the shipped device, so you decide to use a different one.

> But you can replace the ECU with one of your choice.

As a counterexample: There are certain maintenance procedures for late model Audis that can only be done at the dealership. The diagnostic tool is connected to the car and then phones home to a central system to get vehicle-specific codes required to perform some actions. One such action, oddly enough is getting the car to recognize a new ECU[a].

[a] you can circumvent this by reflashing another ECU with special firmware to become a 'clone' of the original but this would be very analogous to having to 'root' your phone to install different software.

there is an industry designed specifically for getting better performance from your car by customizing the ECU

From what I hear, the ECU tuning industry works hand-in-hand with the automakers and they cooperate on the DRM.

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