ECU Shutdown

Just thought I would put the feelers out to see if anyone has ever heard of the major problem I have come across. Basically was called in by a customer to recover his car after a friend of a friend of a friend decided to do him a favour and try and remap his car. His car being a minted 08 plate A4 2.0 TDI CR120 Avant. I did a scan of his car usng VCDS and it had approx 10 faults on the majority of modules. Now I consulted Shark Performance over this and took a copy of the scan log and cleared them all (apparently they were transient faults at the time) and then continued trying to remap his car which the customer was happy about............now here comes the interesting part. His ECU then decided to fail and go into hibernation as they call it. Remote access via Shark could not identify the problem so his ECU was removed and sent to Shark immediatley. Turns out that whoever had tried to map the A4 beforehand had caused a critical software confliction due to what he had uploaded to the cars ECU and it had shutdown...........Audi, Shark and a host of other tuning experts were consulted and the ECU was dispatched down to London for an ECU software guru to look at it..........even he couldn't get it to wake up. End result is one new ECU required for the A4. So if anyone is thinking of having their car remapped on the cheap then please take some time in doing your research about the company thats doing it as it can backfire and lead to an expensive recovery as shown here. Apparently this is the 1st time that this has been seen where an ECU will refuse to 'wake up' and thats using a multitude of professional software that head tech guys use.

No exact figure but 4 days of work on the ECU............return trip to London and new ECU............over £1.5k anyway. The customer is so annoyed with himself as he was supposed to book in with me before his wee trip down south and thought he would save time by getting it done by a friends friend on the cheap..............lesson learnt I think. As he came to me and I have the full customer and tech support from Shark they are doing their upmost to get this guys car back on the road. Many favours have been called in. 1 week car hire from my friends in Thrifty at rock bottom prices and other car related stuff and hopefully he should be mobile again next week.

The only info I have on the other guy was that it took him approx 5 mins with a hand held device, plugged it into the OBD port and then left as quickly as he appeared. The customer then drove the car from down South back up here then phoned me to say his car was bag of nails and voila here we are now. I have said for him to contact the other bloke and inform him of whats happened but he just shrugs his shoulders and says 'You learn by your mistakes'.

Car was in limp mode and when we tried to interrogate the ECU it shut down. Tried going through recovery mode and boot mode but ECU would not basically come online. Dead as a doornail as they say. The ECU was a non-encrypted version so there shouldn't of been a problem. Shame really but hopefully should all be sorted and he'll be back on the road mid next week.