I have been having some performance issues with my Lightning, so I thought that "resetting" (removing battery cables for 4 hours) the ECU would "clear" it out. When I owned a Toyota Tundra, everybody suggested a ECU reset anytime you modified anything or changed over to a K&N airfilter. My question is:

1. Does the ECU in the Lightning actually "store" any thing, i.e. learned data?

2. If it does, how long does it take to relearn?

 

I can't answer your ?s but you don't need to take your battery cables off for 4 hours. All you need to do is remove the neg. cable from the post, turn on the 'headlights'--for about 5 mins., turn them off, and then reconnect the neg. cable. That will 'clear' everything that can be 'cleared' and your ECM will relearn what your chip 'tells' it.

Dan

 

Master Of Pain:
You may find the info you are looking for in this thread, second page.

F150 Thread

David

 

Thanks, that thread was really informative!

I guess that the second question is, would there ever be a real "need" to reset the ECU? Could it get bad data stored and cause poor performance w/o self correction?

 

I'm not sure if this an issue with Lightnings or not, but many cars (my supra, for example) usually gains about 2mph and 2 tenths off the reset of the ECU.

What causes the performance decrease is the long term fuel curve and especially the timing maps.

The toyota ECU seems to pull out timing permanently (until a reset) -- so you lose timing on the big end which causes your power loss. The only way to clear this is with an ECU reset.

The L may do something similar. The only way to know for sure is on a dyno/track, etc. Or if you have a ford engineer that does the ECM programming as a buddy =)