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Originally Posted by TopG42
You seem knowledgeable on this subject. So going back to the first comment about the dealer tracing the race chip, do you think they can actually use the logs against me in a warranty claim if I present the car as stock? Just curious about how much digging they would do or if its something extremely obvious in the logs
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I am only in the position to speculate. I have never personally encountered a source that I deemed authoritative on the matter. So I cannot confirm if/when BMW knows what you’ve done. But I can explain why it’s very easy for me to believe that they could.
I have plugged in my ECUTEK Connect to preview the available logging parameters in my new BMWs, and it’s out of this world. Theres stuff in there that wouldn’t even occur to most people might be a loggable parameter until witnessing it.
If we used that tool and we logged all available parameters while doing a pull at stock power, we could build a sort of baseline to see where all the parameter values roughly land on a stock car.
Do it again at higher power thanks to a fancy boost controller, and there are going to be countless parameters that can be used as a dead giveaway that things are hugely deviating from the expected values. You could write code that focuses and presents particular points of interest.
So the data to separate stock from modified cars is constantly being generated. What I cannot tell you, and don’t know who can: when and what is the car passively logging? And who can access it? Any dealer tech, or just an elite team of investigators sent out on a case by case?
Maybe it’s not logging anything. Maybe it’s logging everything. Maybe it’s logging peak-hold values of the most obvious parameters. Maybe the last hour of all parameters or a chosen set of them, and then constantly being overwritten. I honesty have no damn clue, so I cannot even promise you that BMW can in-fact detect one of those piggybacks after it’s been removed. But it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t take advantage of their cars making it easy to.