04redmach1

ITs called the Magneson act I THINK . NOT TO MENTION no the dealer cannot tell you have flashed your CPU. when you return to stock you clear all DTC's. I am SCT dealer you WILL NOT have any problems. Now that act is good to an xtent. If they can prove that is what caused problems then ur done. But programmer will not harm you.

dafaic

Back when i had mine i took it in with a cai on it and tuned since i had 4.10's installed. I got the car back that afternoon and the tune was gone they had reflashed the computer due to updates in the code. Which is done from time to time. So if someone was paying attention they would see that the car had already recieved the updated code yet it was back to original. Anyway just an FYI the dealer flashing computers happens all the time thats why i went with a tuner for the impala instead of just buying a pcm. Only problem is they don't make the niffty little xcal stuff for impalas so i have a laptop programmer that works similar to a stand alone fuel management system. Which is cool. Allows me to tune for the methanol injection i am running. Is the xcal 2 better than the xcal v1. I had V1 and was pretty happy with it. It just didn't have alot of tuning features. Compared to what i use now those hand held programmers are elementary. I have to adjust injector flow rates, maf tables, commanded afr, spark advance, torque management, boost control, oh and i was able to delete all codes from the system tha dealt with the rear O2 sensor and the cat since both were removed.

And yes you can cash in your warranty. Most likely they will send the money to the lender if it's not paid off and you can call the lender and say take that money you just recieved and put it down for my next 3-5 payments. Thats what i did and not having to make a payment for 3 1/2 months allowed me to bring the impala to mid 13's. Next is heads a smaller pulley and 12's. $1,000 put this car into 13's only another $500 to hit 12's.

DanteMo

There has been alot of debate on if the dealer can really tell you reflashed your pcm chip to stock. I don't understand how they can tell. There's always the statement that "They can tell you did it". But how? Can someone explain that? As I understand it you are taking the bits off the PCM (1's and 0's) that make up the instruction set for the cpu (aka like the BIOS for a computer). When I load the new BIOS the BIOS rewrites the entire instruction set for the chipset. Now, usually there's a version number/date for the BIOS so that's how you tell what version. However, if I reload an old bios image onto a computer, you could never ever tell that there was a newer BIOS on that chipset. Because it totally rewrites the firmware of the chipset. Same thing on hacking DVD players to remove region codes etc... It's a binary image you are loading. Can someone confirm this with a technical explanation of how in the hell Ford can save firmware information when you are overwriting the entire firmware for the chipset? Or maybe tunes don't completely overwrite the firmware of the PCM and their is a date that determines when it was loaded?