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There's also a major safety argument that just isn't in play with things like cell phones or toasters. The stakes are lower.

If you really want to play with engine management, there's always megasquirt.info and wb02.com, which are more hackable anyway.

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On my car, and many others, the stock Bosch Motronic ECU is flashable through the OBDII port. You use community developed software and community information to build a ROM image, do the checksums, and flash it right on.

Thats not true for all Motronic ECUs. The OEM has to decide which kind of tuning protection they want to have activated.

Some OEMs opt for the low settings where tuning gets detected and logged while still allowing you to run new or modified code while others only allow the flashing of signed code.

Also, as far as i know from motronic mods, they mostly only change calibration data and not the code itself, but i may be wrong.

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