I agree there is a time and place for mappable management, and a V8 with a pair of GT28's nailed on the side, or a snorting track car with wild cams and throttle bodies is right up its street.
A 1.8T running a big turbo however is not, unless ofcourse he was planning on fitting a GT35 and making 600hp.
I've messed with a DTA unit and looked into megasquirt, but they're certainly not easy to map, even if your good with figures. You need to know what figures the engine wants, ie how much ignition advance is safe across both RPM and load sites, and then the fuelling, and it all comes down to the guy doing the mapping. Yes you could map it yourself, but when you punch holes in the pistons of your expensive freshly built engine you wont be very happy.
A friend of mine built a pretty well tweaked 1.6 8v engine for his Nova a few years ago. Since its not 1979 we decided to avoid twin webbers and go with DTA and EFI. Got it all running and took it to dastek in fife for a map. £500 later, it was "mapped" and made 150hp at 7100rpm, beautiful torque curve and power delivery. It could really have done with another 900rpm to make the most of the cam, as the power was still climing at the limiter, but we didnt have solid lifters in the motor. Sounds great, until you tried to start it from cold, or drive it round asda car park, or infact do anything that didnt involve full throttle. The low/midrange area of the map was absolute garbage. Now yes, it was all down to the people that mapped it, but unfortunately you dont find that out until after spending the money.
I guess it depends how you see your daily driver. To me a daily should be something thats completely reliable, perhaps even a little boring, reasonably frugal etc. It should have all the toys and luxuries to get on with the daily grind. The weekend/day-off/fun car is the one with the snorting great V8 and a pair of blowers the size of the moon.
I'd happily fit megasquirt to my Disco (and probably will at some point) becuase the OE options are crap, and 'squirt allows me to use wasted spark and suchlike. The Defender however will be running on the standard A8 ECU, becuase its best suited for the job.
From how i understand it, Oranoco has his escort as a toy, and the A4 is his everyday motor, and given that i cant see him dropping 10k into the engine of the A4, i think that sticking with a standard management system is the best option in this case, even if he fits a bigger turbo. The escort engine is quite likely in a higher state of tune, and the OE escort management is probably a LOT worse than the Motronic system in the A4 too (didnt they come with k-jet?), so theres much more benefit to be had there.
