When they engineer a car they realize that these things are going to happen in the span of a cars life.
There is a fuse able link somewhere that was fried.
The hard part is going to be finding it.

You should not need to reprogram a cars ECU, it is hard programmed when it is built and it knows what to do as soon as you plug it in.
The only thing that will be off is the adaptive things, like the drive cycle, but that will reset after you drive it for a few hundred miles.

 

So when you swap an ECU it is just plug and play? Good to know.

 

Yes, it is supposed to be.
If it was wiped clean then no.
It is a computer, take your old desktop that has been sitting in the basement for 2 years and plug it back in and turn it one, what happens?
It works.
Same thing with a car computer.
Car computers dont have hard drives, it is all RAM, new cars may be different but not our older ones.
They know people are going to store cars, part them out, crush them, never change the oil, use the wrong gas, etc.
They do their best to engineer "fail safes" into cars and trucks, they cant cover everything but they do cover most.

You know that $500 Dell computer that you bought online?
$300 of that was for the box.
A friend of mine and his wife are both engineers...they ain't stupid.

 

I'm an engineer and I've been called stupid a quite a few times, actually quite a bit worse.

 

Engineers definitely aren't stupid but they lack common sense when designing vehicles. They forget that anything mechanical is going to need maintenance/repair so they don't figure that in when designing.

 

Well why would a truly smart engineer make a maintenance free or even a truly low maintenance product? Puts him right out of business. When I was on projects I swear to god our partners loved when we screwed up or rushed out a less than perfect product because that meant more followup and BAU work. Clients hated it but they were stuck with us in and our proprietary product.

 

thats why GM destroyed the blueprints and plans for the Stanley Steamer

 

Well, I am totally lost. The last thread I read said,
"Depends on the year, usually you can't do a plug and play, some models also need the matching BCU with matching number, some need to be set up by the dealer and boy if it can be done it is expensive. "

And that was Disco Mike. Spike and Mike seem to be two of the most experienced wrenches on this forum.

What's a guy to do?

 

Are you talking about an ECU (there are a bunch of them) or the ECM? Land Rover says the ECM has to be reprogrammed with TestBook.

 

I am pretty sure that the terms ECU and ECM are interchangeable. I think that the one refered to in this thread is the main one for the engine under the hood.