Any progress on V8 engine swap options?

[78F350]

Originally Posted by Fiddlebog

For those of you that have done the A8 swap: how did you tackle the ECU? Does it need an immobilizer or anything else like the 986 does?
I'm working on building a car with a 5-speed transaxle and am looking for the simplest solution for an engine to put on there.

There's a lot to learn about the ECUs and programming. I spent a couple months reading and learning about flashing the ME7.1 ECUs on NefMoto - Index , then practiced flashing and deleting the immobilizer code on some cheap ECUs that I picked up on eBay. It's been a couple years and I'd need to review to do it all again.

As far as I know, the ECUs for the 32 valve engines (ME 5.xx) can not be flashed and need to have the chip replaced to reprogram them. They are not 'immobilized'. 034 Motorsports sells a tuned chip.
The 40 valve engines use ME 7.1. Not sure, but 2000 year model might not have the immobilizer, but the later ones do.

Immobilizer delete and flashing are just a matter of following a detailed procedure with a computer program (software available from the NefMoto website). You have to have an interface cable and a way to power the ECU. Tuning and making your own modifications gets a lot deeper.