E38 question

[johnnoumea]

Hi there,

A customer has had some trouble with a quiet bad short on his ls3 corvette while fitting back the grounds after a header install . The ecm ground was actually fitted to the starter motor + . The car wouldn't start etc until the mistake was found and corrected. After that the car did start but didn't run very well ( bad missfiring after 4k and very little power ) and ended up dying a couple of days later and not starting again. It was figured the car had a dead battery , changing it didn't help and so the customer ordered a new ecm thinking it might be the issue. A couple of days later he figured his silverado had the same ecm as the corvette so basicaly we were thinking about using the supposedly damaged ecm , loading the silverado file on it and trying to start the engine in the truck. We figured it would help us find out if the ecm was actually the problem or if we have something worse like a melted wire or something.

We checked all the fuses and everything looked fine. other than the missfiring the car would sometimes stall while driving at low rpm and throw a 'service traction control system' message , but while trying to read the DTCs the flashtool wouldn't find any.

Do you guys think this ecm 'swap' would work for testing purposes ? Or would you advise against it ?

[GMPX]

What are the years of the vehicles? It might not be possible as GM made some changes to the E38 that mean exchanging different year model OS's can't be done on some vehicles.

[johnnoumea]

both 09

[gmh308]

The truck generally runs a different throttle body, intake and injectors. You may get it to work for testing purposes, but the reality is that a truck ECM is looking for truck platforms components and a vette ECM for vette platform components (BCM/ABS etc) so unlikely it will trouble free testing.

[johnnoumea]

yeah but if we load the truck files on the corvette ecm it should be working like a copy of the truck ecm right ? The point for us is to check if the fault is coming from the vette ecm , we figured that if it was loaded with the truck file and the truck didn't start it would be a safe assumption to say the ecm took a hit

[gmh308]

yeah but if we load the truck files on the corvette ecm it should be working like a copy of the truck ecm right ? The point for us is to check if the fault is coming from the vette ecm , we figured that if it was loaded with the truck file and the truck didn't start it would be a safe assumption to say the ecm took a hit

You can try it but as the trucks run a different throttle body they also run a different throttle controller calibration. You can post of the truck tune and I can take a look at how close they might be.