Replacing your cars computer (ECU – electronic control unit) – the brains of your engine – is not something most people ever think about, until something really bad happens and you need a new one. After adding 50k miles on the clock to our JDM rides, we had a sudden dead stop issue. After extensive troubleshooting and an expensive 2nd opinion later, we decided to explore the route of purchasing a new ECU.
Initially our thoughts went to purchase a good donor unit online, swap it out and hope the engine would run normally again…
however this proved to be quite pricey for a 30yr old car. That being said, even a modern cars ECU can be expensive depending on the make/model. Wishing to avoid dropping $1-2k on a new ECU meant we had some alternative options on our hands.
- DIY – take that sucker apart if you have the electronics/engineering background to do so – note that there are some Capacitor replacement kits being sold online now for DIYers, just lookup your ECU part number + capacitor kit
- Mail-In Repair – there are many online mail-in repair services that were relatively affordable ($100 – $300), but we didn’t want to risk other damage with shipping the ECU
- Local electronics repair shop – call some electronics repair shops or ask your mechanic if they work with any. We were lucky enough to take our ECU to a local business we found, and they fixed it on the spot with no appointment in 10mins.
We got very lucky by just needing some capacitors replaced on our ECU. Before you drop the cash on an entire replacement unit, consider taking it to a repair shop for a once over.
The crazy part, we had two ECUs go out within a few weeks of one another. This was during a hot summer and we believe the heat just put additional stress on the aging capacitors.
