I know this has probably been posted before but I was talking to someone today that said a dealer can STILL pull info, that the programmer was there, from the pcm even AFTER a programmer has returned the pcm to stock tune. Any truth to that?

 

Yes they can. Will they hold that against you? It depends on the relationship with your dealer (and what you might be seeking).

 

It sounds too James Bond-like. Ford would have to build that into the electronics and that would be a cost not worth one or two warranty repairs.

If you're talking about the P-1000 code, just drive around for a couple of days to complete two drive cycles and the P-1000 will be gone.

 

If you download the OEM program to the tuner, then this is a clean uncontaminated file. Then you tweak it and reflash the PCM. Next you flash the clean OEM file back to the PCM. Where would the PCM store that it has been flashed? It's got the original program in it that you would think, does not have a code in it already saying you flashed it. Maybe there is an eprom chip that that runs the flash command. It could trip a counter in another memory device and maybe Ford can read how many times the PCM has been flashed. Even if this were true, Ford flashes updates into PCM all the time so how would they know if your flash was an "authorized" one or not?

Need an EE's perspcetive on this. Anyone know how modern PCM's are programmed around this?

 

The last time I checked into this, only the 7.3L models stored all the codes and everything and kept them stored. The software had not yet come out to do this on the 6.0L. I checked into this about 8 months ago so things may have changed since then.