Not always the case, unfortunately...

**DISCLAIMER**
This post is not intended in way to be a discussion on tuners, tuning ability, tuning software, or anything related to that.
I intend this is to be a purely informative post to help others in my situation who may have purchased a car with an Ecutek tune and wish to get the Ecutek "lock" removed in order to have it tuned elsewhere.

I recently purchased a 2003 MY02 STi (build date Jan 03) from a local dealership. I knew that car had some sort of tune but was unaware what it was and the dealership didn't know either.
I have a tactrix cable and so one of the first things I did when I got the car home was to attempt to download the map and see what it was running. I quickly worked out it had a locked Ecutek tune on it.

No problems, I thought. I will just take the car to a local Ecutek dealer and get the Ecutek lock removed..
After paying a small fee and getting my car back after the "unlocking" process I then attempted to download the rom again. Guess what? same error message. The Ecutek dealer also remarked that he had seen this happen before but he thought it was in fact my cable or software that was at fault.

After much confusion involving going back to the Ecutek dealer, calling Brett @ MRT, browsing forum posts for hours, and even e-mailing Ecutek in the UK, I came to a conclusion:

Certain older ECU's (i.e. Pre Hawkeye) **CANNOT* be completely cleaned of Ecutek using conventional methods by an Ecutek dealer where they flash back the factory map. Instead, the Ecu will be forever "LOCKED" to Ecutek meaning it will have to be re-tuned by an Ecutek dealer ONLY. In my research I also discovered that there are certain places that may be able to do some sort of "hard reset" (Chiptorque in QLD is one) but I have no way of confirming that this works and the charges seem to start at around $220 per ecu.

What message am I trying to get across?

If you have a Pre-Hawkeye/06 ECU with an Ecutek tune, then just be aware there is NO guarantee that you will be able to pay to remove Ecutek from it. Your best bet is probably to try and source a second hand ECU from the same car and take it to Subaru to get your key immobiliser recoded to the new ecu (I was quoted $154 for this job from Subie Ossy Park). I've now had this done and I can now read and write to my new ECU with Tactrix/Ecuflash.

I think in the past people in my situation may have just given up and taken their car to an Ecutek dealer for tuning. This is of course always an option, as you will have the license already on your Ecu and so won't have to fork out for a new license. But the purpose of this post is to inform people that their is ANOTHER option if you do not wish to have your car retuned with Ecutek.

As I said, this is not an Ecutek diss, and i'm not trying to tell people who they should get their car tuned by, I just want to try and help others who may have been or will be in the same situation as me and would like to know what all of their options are, because frankly it was rather frustrating.

Email from Ecutek UK:


tl;dr It's not always possible to remove Ecutek from some older ECU's, cheapest option might be to source a second hand ECU and pay Subaru $150 odd to recode your keys instead.